World Labs, founded by Fei-Fei Li, raised $1 billion from AMD, Autodesk ($200M), Emerson Collective, Fidelity, and NVIDIA, reportedly at a $5 billion valuation. The company builds world models, AI systems that generate navigable 3D environments from text, images, or video. Its product Marble, launched November 2025, creates editable 3D worlds from multimodal inputs and exports them as Gaussian splats or triangle meshes. A public API released January 2026 makes this programmable. As part of the raise, Autodesk will collaborate with World Labs at the research and model level, starting with entertainment.
Autodesk dominates 3D CAD software across architecture, engineering, construction, manufacturing, and entertainment. It is already building neural CAD, a generative AI trained on geometric data that produces working 3D models with physical understanding. World Labs extends that from individual design files to full spatial environments. A designer could sketch an office layout in World Labs, then refine specific components in Autodesk. The World API already connects to robotics simulators (NVIDIA Isaac Sim, MuJoCo) and architecture platforms. This is not a research partnership. It is a product integration between the largest CAD company and a spatial AI startup.
The raise also establishes spatial intelligence as a distinct AI investment category. Google DeepMind and Runway are building competing world models. The convergence of world models with established CAD toolchains signals that 3D content creation is shifting from manual modeling toward AI-generated environments that understand geometry and physics.
Sources:
- TechCrunch: World Labs $1B Raise
- World Labs Funding Blog
- World Labs Marble Blog
- World Labs World API Blog
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@misc{kabui2026,
author = {{Kabui, Charles}},
title = {World {Labs:} {Spatial} {Intelligence} {AI} {Raises} \$1
{Billion} with {Autodesk} {Partnership} for {3D} {World}
{Generation}},
date = {2026-02-21},
url = {https://toknow.ai/posts/world-labs-billion-dollar-spatial-intelligence-autodesk-3d-world-models/},
langid = {en-GB}
}