Key Takeaways
- World Labs has raised USD 1 billion in fresh funding. The company was founded by Fei-Fei Li. Autodesk alone contributed USD 200 million as part of the round.
- The funding round includes participation from AMD, Autodesk, Emerson Collective, Fidelity Management & Research Company, NVIDIA, and Sea Limited. The investor base reflects strong strategic and institutional backing across AI, semiconductor, and software ecosystems.
- The company has not officially disclosed its valuation. However, prior reporting by Bloomberg indicated discussions around an estimated USD 5 billion valuation.
- World Labs launched its first product, Marble, in late 2025. The platform enables users to generate spatially cohesive, high fidelity 3D environments from images, video, or text inputs.
Quick Recap
World Labs, the spatial intelligence company led by renowned computer scientist Fei-Fei Li, has officially announced a $1 billion fundraise. The announcement was made on February 18, 2026, via the company’s official blog and social media channels. The round includes heavyweight investors such as AMD, Autodesk, Emerson Collective, Fidelity Management & Research Company, NVIDIA, and Sea. The capital will be deployed to accelerate World Labs’ mission of building frontier world models for storytelling, creativity, robotics, and scientific discovery.
Inside the $1 Billion Round: Strategic Partnerships
Autodesk’s $200 million commitment is the single largest disclosed check in the round and comes paired with a strategic advisory role – Autodesk will collaborate with World Labs at the “research and model level,” starting with entertainment use cases. This signals direct integration potential between World Labs’ generative 3D models and Autodesk’s dominant suite of design tools (AutoCAD, Maya, 3ds Max).
NVIDIA and AMD, the two chipmakers powering nearly all AI training infrastructure globally, are both backing World Labs. Their dual presence as investors underscores a hardware-layer bet: spatial intelligence and world models are expected to be among the most GPU-intensive AI workloads in the coming years. Fidelity Management & Research Company brings institutional financial credibility, while Emerson Collective (Laurene Powell Jobs’ organization) and Sea (the Southeast Asian tech conglomerate) add cross-sector and cross-geography reach.
World Labs previously raised $230 million in September 2024 at a $1 billion valuation, with backing from Andreessen Horowitz, NEA, Radical Ventures, and angel investors including Marc Benioff, Jeff Dean, Geoffrey Hinton, Reid Hoffman, and Eric Schmidt. This new $1 billion round represents a dramatic scaling of ambition and investor confidence.
Competitive Landscape
World Labs operates in the emerging “world models” and spatial AI category. Its two most comparable direct competitors are Luma AI and Decart, both venture-backed startups building generative models for 3D or interactive environments.
| Feature / Metric | World Labs | Luma AI | Decart |
| Founded | 2024 | 2021 | 2023 |
| Total Funding | ~$1.23B ($230M + $1B) | ~$900M+ (Series C) | $153M (through Series B) |
| Latest Valuation | ~$5B (estimated) | $4B | $3.1B |
| Core Product | Marble (3D world generation from text/image/video) | Ray3 (video + image + audio generation) | Oasis (real-time interactive AI worlds) |
| 3D World Generation | Yes – persistent, editable, downloadable 3D environments | Partial – video-first with world model ambitions | Yes – real-time interactive simulations |
| Multimodal Support | Text, image, video → 3D | Text, video, audio, images | Real-time video generation, interactive |
| Key Investors | AMD, NVIDIA, Autodesk, Fidelity, a16z, NEA | HUMAIN, a16z, AMD Ventures, Amplify, Matrix | Sequoia, Benchmark, Zeev, Aleph |
| Export/Integration | Unity, Unreal, WebXR | API-driven video output | Enterprise GPU optimization tools |
| Founder Pedigree | Fei-Fei Li (“Godmother of AI,” Stanford, Google Cloud) | Amit Jain | Dean Leitersdorf |
Strategic Analysis
World Labs leads in production-ready 3D world generation with direct game engine exports and the strongest academic-to-industry founder pedigree, making it the natural choice for creative professionals and enterprise 3D workflows.
Luma AI dominates in multimodal video generation and has the largest compute partnership (Project Halo with HUMAIN), positioning it for media and entertainment at scale. Decart wins on real-time interactivity and GPU cost efficiency, making it the most attractive option for gaming and consumer-facing interactive AI experiences.
Techno Trenz Takeaway
I think this is a big deal and not just because of the headline number. In my experience covering AI funding rounds, what separates signal from noise is the quality of the investor syndicate, and World Labs has assembled one of the most strategically coherent cap tables I’ve seen.
Having both NVIDIA and AMD on board isn’t just money; it’s a guarantee of priority hardware access, which is the bottleneck for every serious AI lab right now. Autodesk’s $200 million is arguably even more telling. it means an enterprise software giant with millions of existing 3D workflow users sees World Labs as a core part of its future product stack, not just a speculative bet.
