World Labs Raises $230 Million to Build Spatially Intelligent AI

World Labs, a newly formed company, said Friday (Sept. 13) that it has raised $230 million to build large world models (LWMs) that “perceive, generate 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 in a Friday post on LinkedIn.

World Labs was founded by artificial intelligence (AI) pioneer Fei-Fei Li and computer vision and graphics technologists Justin Johnson, Christoph Lassner and Ben Mildenhall, according to the post.

In a Friday blog post announcing the company’s formation and funding round, World Labs said that spatially intelligent LWMs will allow artists, designers, developers and engineers to imagine and create their own virtual spaces with physics, semantic and control.

“Over time, we expect to train increasingly powerful models with broader capabilities that can be applied in a variety of domains, working alongside people,” the post said.

World Labs’ funding round was led by Andreessen Horowitz, NEA and Radical Ventures, according to the post.

In their own blog post about the investment in World Labs, Andreessen Horowitz general partners Martin Casado and Sarah Wang wrote that the startup aims to build “a true 3D representation of world you can walk through, interact with and build upon.”

This representation of the real world, or a generated virtual world, would allow reasoning about physics and cause-and-effect, they wrote.

“They’re building a foundation model that can generate 3D interactive worlds, which are the basis for spatial reasoning,” Casado and Wang wrote of World Labs. “There are immediate applications for such a model, ranging from design to gaming and from visual effects to AR and VR. And, in the longer term, robotics, as the hardware catches up to the software!”

It was reported in July that World Labs reached unicorn status in just four months and that the technology it is building could revolutionize industries from healthcare to manufacturing.

Li is often referred to as the “godmother of AI” and developed ImageNet, a large-scale visual database that has been pivotal in advancing computer vision.