AI pioneer Li Feifei raises US$230 million for new start-up World Labs
The new venture on 3D spaces counts venture firm Andreessen Horowitz, as well as actor Ashton Kutcher and Google’s Eric Schmidt as investors
The company aims to build software that can use images and other data to make decisions about the three-dimensional world, building what it calls “large world models”. The funding is a sign of investors’ continued appetite for technology that pushes the boundaries of AI, as well as the draw of the field’s biggest names.
The new funding round was led by Andreessen Horowitz, NEA and Radical Ventures, a Canadian venture capital firm where Li is also a scientific partner. World Labs declined to disclose its valuation.
A number of well-known figures in AI also invested, including Jeff Dean, chief scientist of Google DeepMind, and Geoffrey Hinton, a former Google AI researcher known for his work to advance the field of machine learning. Hinton is an investor in Radical Ventures. Nvidia’s venture arm has also backed the company.
Other individual investors include venture capitalist and actor Ashton Kutcher, Salesforce chief executive officer Marc Benioff, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt.
