Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs has secured a $200 million investment from software design giant Autodesk as part of a larger $1 billion round from backers, including AMD, Emerson Collective, Fidelity, Nvidia, and others.
World Labs, which emerged from stealth in 2024 with $230 million at a $1 billion valuation, declined to say whether the latest round boosted its valuation. However, reports a month ago suggested it was aiming to raise at a $5 billion valuation.
The partnership between World Labs and Autodesk will see the two companies collaborating to explore how World Labs’ models — AI systems that can generate and reason about immersive 3D environments — can work alongside Autodesk’s tools, and vice versa, starting with a focus on entertainment use cases.
For World Labs, Autodesk’s investment is a signal that its product has commercial appeal. The startup’s first world model product, Marble, released last November, lets users create editable, downloadable 3D environments.
Autodesk is one of the biggest developers of 3D CAD (computer-aided design) software. Its platform underpins architectural, engineering, construction, manufacturing, and entertainment workflows. That focus on the built world makes investment in advanced spatial AI a natural extension of its core business.
Or as Li put it in a statement: “Autodesk has long helped people think spatially and solve real-world problems and, together, we share a clear purpose: building physical AI that augments human creativity and puts more powerful tools in the hands of designers, builders, and creators.”
As part of the deal, Autodesk will serve as an adviser to World Labs, and the two will collaborate at the “research and model level.”
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Daron Green, Autodesk’s chief scientist, told TechCrunch the partnership is still in its early days, so the precise form it’s going to take hasn’t been determined yet.
“You could anticipate us consuming their models or them consuming our models in different settings,” Green said.
He mused that customers might like to start with a world-model-based sketch in World Labs (say, of an office layout) and then drill down on certain design aspects (like the design of the desk), which is where Autodesk’s tech might come in.
“Similarly, you might want to take an object that you’ve designed in our [platform], and put it in a context that you create through one of [World Labs’] prompts,” Green said.
Green added that data sharing is not part of the agreement.
Green said the two companies plan to start with media and entertainment use cases. Most companies building world models — including Google DeepMind and Runway — see gaming and interactive entertainment as an initial go-to-market strategy.
Autodesk already works with most major media production companies and has been training models for character animation.
“These are close to world models,” Green said. “They’re a characterization of an animal in the world that’s responding to physical constraints like time, maybe a terrain it needs to traverse. So there’s a physical understanding in the model, and you can see how that might be combined [with World Labs’ tech]. You’re not just animating the dog, but you’re giving it a world within which it can now interact.”
The partnership with World Labs supports Autodesk’s broader push to integrate more AI features across its software portfolio. The company is developing “neural CAD,” a new kind of generative AI model trained on geometric data that can reason about components and entire systems. Put simply, it can generate working 3D models, not just images, with an understanding of how those designs would function in the real world.
Autodesk’s neural CAD models are already being integrated into the firm’s product design and architecture products as a step toward more advanced spatial intelligence. But World Labs’ models could help extend that capability beyond individual design files toward more holistic digital representations of the physical world.
Green thinks different AI systems, including large language models, world models, and neural CAD will be combined in the future to improve designs for Autodesk’s customers.
“If AI is to be truly useful, it must understand worlds, not just words,” Li said in the statement. “Worlds are governed by geometry, physics, and dynamics, and reconciling the semantic, spatial, and physical is the next great frontier of AI.”
This article has been updated to include more details on World Labs’ raise.
