Spatial intelligence AI startup World Labs launched Friday with more than $230 million in total funding.
The funding was co-led by Andreessen Horowitz, NEA and Radical Ventures. Other investors include Marc Benioff, Ashton Kutcher, Adobe Ventures, AMD Ventures, Databricks Ventures and NVentures, the venture capital arm of Nvidia.
It was reported just last month that the Stanford, California-based company had raised a pair of financing rounds two months apart, and that the latest valued the company at over $1 billion.
World Labs is co-founded by artificial intelligence pioneer Fei-Fei Li, commonly referred to as the “godmother of AI.” She previously has led AI at Google Cloud and is a co-director of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence. She has spent much of her time trying to solve the issues surrounding building Large World Models for AI that can perceive and interact with the 3D world.
“We aim to lift AI models from the 2D plane of pixels to full 3D worlds — both virtual and real — endowing them with spatial intelligence as rich as our own,” the company said on its site announcing its launch. “Human spatial intelligence evolved over millennia; but in this time of extraordinary progress, we see the opportunity to imbue AI with this ability in the near term.”
AI’s hot as ever
The round is just the latest huge raise by an AI startup — once again showing investors’ insatiable appetite for the technology.
Just last week, AI research lab Safe Superintelligence raised $1 billion from a litany of big-name investors including Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital. The round valued the company at $5 billion, per Reuters, which first reported the round.
Then this week AI-enhanced work assistant and enterprise search startup Glean raised more than $260 million in a Series E funding at a $4.6 billion valuation co-led by Altimeter Capital and DST Global.
Of course, none of that even comes close to the reported $6.5 billion OpenAI reportedly is in talks to raise at a mind-blowing $150 billion valuation.
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Illustration: Dom Guzman
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