World Labs, a clandestine firm founded by renowned Stanford University AI professor Fei-Fei Li, raised two rounds of funding two months apart, according to several reports. According to many people familiar with the transactions, NEA led the most recent funding, which valued the company at more than $1 billion. The Financial Times announced the $100 million round in July.
This represented a huge boost in valuation from World Labs' initial funding, which occurred in April and valued the company at $200 million, according to one participant. Andreessen Horowitz and Canadian firm Radical Ventures, where Li is a scientific partner, were among the first round investors, according to Reuters in May.
Li, widely known as a “Godmother of AI,” discussed how machines can be trained to develop human-like “spatial intelligence” in a TED talk earlier this year. “Very little three-dimensional data exists in the world,” said one investor familiar with World Labs’ approach. “Autonomous vehicle companies collect that data by driving thousands and thousands of miles to create three-dimensional data, which they then use to train their machines. In all other applications, like serving coffee, there’s no three-dimensional data. Collecting that data is expensive because the universe of places you have to collect data is enormous.”
She stated that once ready, World Labs' models can be used in gaming and robotics applications.
Li is well known for her contributions to ImageNet, a dataset that revolutionized computer vision. She is now on partial leave from her position as co-director of Stanford's Human-Centered AI Institute, which will end in December 2025.