SAN FRANCISCO — In a move that signals the next major pivot in the artificial intelligence arms race, World Labs, the startup founded by “Godmother of AI” Dr. Fei-Fei Li, announced on February 18, 2026, that it has raised $1 billion in a transformative funding round.
The capital injection, which includes a strategic $200 million investment from Autodesk, was backed by a “who’s who” of the silicon and finance worlds, including NVIDIA, AMD, Fidelity Management & Research, Emerson Collective, and Sea. While the company has not officially disclosed its new valuation, industry reports suggest the round places World Labs at a staggering $5 billion valuation.
Spatial Intelligence: The Frontier Beyond Language
The investment underscores a critical shift from “Language AI” to “Physical AI.” While models like GPT-4 process text, World Labs is focused on spatial intelligence—the ability for AI to understand, navigate, and reason within three-dimensional space.
“Seeing is doing,” Dr. Li noted in a statement accompanying the raise. “For AI to truly augment human creativity and robotics, it must move beyond flat data to comprehend the geometry, physics, and dynamics of the physical world.”
Introducing MARBLE: The Architect of Instant Worlds
At the heart of World Labs’ commercial strategy is MARBLE, a multimodal world model that allows users to generate high-fidelity, interactive 3D environments from simple text prompts, single images, or short video clips.
- Cohesive Reality: Unlike traditional 3D rendering, which requires weeks of manual labor, MARBLE generates persistent worlds that maintain “spatial coherence”—meaning objects stay in place and follow physical rules as a user navigates through them.
- The “Living Lab”: The platform is already being utilized by creative studios and robotics firms to simulate environments for training autonomous agents and designing immersive storytelling experiences.
- Integration: Through the partnership with Autodesk, World Labs plans to integrate its generative capabilities directly into CAD (Computer-Aided Design) software, allowing architects and engineers to “dream” a site into existence before refining it with precision tools.
A Global Hardware Vote of Confidence
The participation of both NVIDIA and AMD is particularly significant. Training “world models” requires exponentially more computational power than text models, as the AI must simulate depth, lighting, and movement simultaneously. Their backing suggests that World Labs is positioned as a primary driver of future high-end GPU and AI-accelerator demand.
The Road to 2030
With $1 billion in the war chest, World Labs is scaling its team of researchers and engineers to tackle the “last mile” of robotics: enabling machines to move through the world with the same spatial intuition as humans.
As the digital and physical worlds continue to blur, World Labs isn’t just building another chatbot—it’s building the software that understands the very room you’re sitting in.
