Fei-Fei Li, known in the industry as the “Godmother of AI,” has raised $1 billion with her startup World Labs.
🤝 Rocket start: Li only founded World Labs in 2024. In September 2024, World Labs had already raised $230 million. Since then, the valuation has more than doubled. The new round values the company at around $5 billion.
The details
World Labs is developing “Spatial Intelligence”: AI that can understand and model the physical world in 3D. The first product is called Marble and generates interactive 3D worlds from images or text.
The round is led by Autodesk with $200 million alone, joined by Andreessen Horowitz, Nvidia, AMD, Fidelity, and Singapore’s Sea Limited.
Who is Fei-Fei Li?
Born in Beijing and later moving to the United States, she is now a central voice in the U.S. AI scene.
She is one of the most influential researchers in modern AI, especially due to ImageNet, the dataset that massively accelerated computer vision in the 2010s.
Li previously served as Chief Scientist for AI/ML at Google Cloud before returning to Stanford and later launching World Labs.
Why everyone is betting on Spatial Intelligence
The thesis: AI must understand the physical world in 3D, not just process text and images. This opens up applications in robotics, AR/VR, and scientific simulation.
Meta’s chief scientist Yann LeCun is pursuing a similar approach with AMI Labs, and Google DeepMind is developing its own system called Genie. The participation of Singapore’s Sea Limited highlights the interest of Asian tech giants.
The investor logic: After the LLM boom, spatial intelligence will be the next growth market.
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