Fei-Fei Li’s startup World Labs has secured $1 billion in fresh funding to accelerate its work on spatial intelligence, a fast-emerging category of AI focused on understanding and simulating the three-dimensional physical world.
The new capital significantly expands the company’s war chest and underscores growing investor interest in “world models,” which many researchers see as a critical step beyond text-centric AI.
World Labs disclosed the new raise on February 18–19, 2026. The financing brings the company’s total funding to well above $1.2 billion since it emerged from stealth in 2024.
Bloomberg previously reported the company was in discussions earlier in 2026 at around a $5 billion valuation, though World Labs has not confirmed a current figure.
World Labs is focused on what Fei-Fei Li describes as spatial intelligence. Instead of working primarily with text or flat images, these systems aim to reason about environments in three dimensions.
The broader goal is to build AI that can:
This class of systems, often called world models, is gaining attention as a possible foundation for more physically aware AI systems.
In late 2025, World Labs introduced its first model, Marble.
Marble can generate 3D environments from text or image prompts, turning descriptions into navigable virtual scenes. The technology is positioned as an early step toward AI systems that can reason about real-world physics and spatial relationships.
The emphasis on interactive 3D generation distinguishes World Labs from the crowded field of text-focused AI startups.
The investor mix reveals how different industries view spatial AI as strategic infrastructure.
Autodesk’s $200 million investment comes with an advisory role. The design software giant appears to be exploring how world models could enhance:
For Autodesk, spatial AI could eventually reshape how complex physical systems are designed and tested.
Nvidia and AMD’s participation reflects the heavy compute demands of large world models. Training and running 3D-aware AI systems typically requires substantial GPU resources.
Backing World Labs gives both companies a front-row seat to a potentially major new category of AI workloads.
World Labs is not alone in pursuing world models. Research groups and major labs are increasingly exploring AI systems that move beyond language.
Notable parallel efforts include:
The common thesis is that future AI systems will need grounded spatial understanding to operate effectively in the physical world.
World Labs launched publicly in 2024 with $230 million in initial funding and quickly achieved unicorn status.
The latest raise dramatically scales the company’s ambitions and resources.
World Labs’ $1 billion funding round signals rising confidence that the next major AI frontier may lie in spatial intelligence rather than language alone. With backing from major chipmakers and a deep partnership with Autodesk, the startup is positioning itself as a foundational player in AI systems that understand and simulate the physical world.
Whether world models mature as quickly as investors expect remains an open question, but the scale of this bet shows that the race to build physically aware AI is accelerating fast.
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