World Labs Raises $1 Billion to Scale Spatial AI

World Labs, the frontier artificial intelligence research and product company founded by AI pioneer Fei-Fei Li, raised $1 billion in new funding.

“We are focused on accelerating our mission to advance spatial intelligence by building world models that revolutionize storytelling, creativity, robotics, scientific discovery and beyond,” World Labs said in a Wednesday (Feb. 18) blog post announcing the funding.

The company said in the post that its first product is Marble, an AI model that enables users to create 3D worlds from images, video or text.

PYMNTS reported in July 2024 that World Labs is the brainchild of Li and that the firm achieved unicorn status in its first four months. The firm aims to teach computers to see and understand the world in three dimensions, which could revolutionize industries from healthcare to manufacturing.

When World Labs announced in September 2024 that it raised $230 million, it said it was working to build large world models (LWMs) that “perceive, generate and interact with the 3D world.”

“We aim to lift AI models from the 2D plane of pixels to full 3D worlds — both virtual and real — endowing them with spatial intelligence as rich as our own,” the company said at the time in a blog post.

PYMNTS reported at the time that spatial AI, a technology that allows machines to understand and interact with 3D environments, was gaining traction in the AI industry and could have applications in architecture, robotics, entertainment and other industry sectors.

When World Labs launched Marble in November, PYMNTS reported that the product signaled a shift in the AI landscape as companies move beyond language and image models toward systems that can generate and reason over 3D environments.

Marble also represented World Labs’ transition from research to commercialization, as the company made the product available through freemium and paid tiers that support exports in Guassian splats, traditional meshes and video files, which allows integration with creative pipelines, simulation tools and real-time rendering agents.

Li said Feb. 4 that as AI systems move closer to execution rather than analysis, their limitations are becoming less about reasoning in text and more about understanding and acting within physical environments.

“The ability to understand, to reason, to interact with and to navigate the real 3D, 4D physical worlds is the foundation,” Li said.