Startup Odyssey has secured a Series B funding round of $310 million.
The Palo Alto-based AI lab is one of a growing number of companies developing world models, which are trained to learn how the physical world works.
The round valued the company at 1.45 billion and was led by Natural Capital, with participation from Amazon, AMD Ventures, the CIA-associated IQT fund and GV (Google Ventures). Other investors included Jeff Dean; Google’s chief scientist, Qasar Younis, founder of autonomous vehicle company Applied Intuition; and Kyle Vogt, who headed up General Motors’ robotaxi subsidiary, Cruise.
Many see world models as the next step in AI, with the potential to transform industries beyond language-based models due to their capacity to learn from and simulate the physical world.
By creating a representation of reality that accounts for cause and effect, time and physics, world models can predict outcomes before actually carrying out tasks. This simulation of the physical world in virtual environments offers particularly strong potential in areas such as autonomous vehicles and robotics.
In tandem with the funding, Odyssey also entered into a new deal with AWS, which will become its favored cloud provider.
“We believe world models represent a new class of foundation model — AI that can understand and simulate the world itself,” Odyssey’s co-founder and CEO, Oliver Cameron, said in a statement. “The last few years have seen major breakthroughs in scaling, interactivity, multimodality, and physics accuracy, and the field is now advancing extremely quickly.”
Among Odyssey’s key advances over the past few years are Odyssey-2-Max, a step forward in physics accuracy for simulation; Starchild-1, a first real-time multimodal world model; Agora-1, which introduced multi-agent interaction within a shared world simulation; and PROWL (prioritized regret-driven optimization for world model learning), which showed how world models can improve through active exploration.
The deal with AWS, meanwhile, will give the AI lab access to AWS’ Trainium chips, which the vendor says will deliver the performance and speed that its complex world models require.
Odyssey said that the latest investment will go toward further research and broader deployment of its models.
Among other world model developers it is competing with are Runway, which raised $315 million in February; World Labs, which raised $1 billion the same month; and AMI Labs, which secured a seed round of $1.03 billion in March.
