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World Labs , a stealthy inauguration founded by renowned Stanford University AI prof Fei - Fei Li , has raised two rounds of funding two months apart , harmonize to multiple reports . The latest financing was lead by NEA and respect the company at over $ 1 billion , TechCrunch has check from several people with knowledge of the investments . This was a $ 100 million round antecedently report by theFinancial Timesin July .
This was a substantial increase in valuation from World Labs ’ initial financing , which pick out home in April , and valued World Labs at $ 200 million , one person said . Investors in the first round included Andreessen Horowitz and Canadian house Radical Ventures , where Li is a scientific partner , Reutersreported in May . Li and NEA did n’t respond to a postulation for input .
World Labs , which was reportedly founded in April and pass from founding to unicorn in four month , suggests that investors continue to place big bets on AI startups founded by large AI scientists , even if the startup businesses are unproven .
In the event of World Labs , what Li is working on is particularly difficult to do and could be essential in the AI - driven humans that Silicon Valley is madly building . It ’s direct to create AI model that can accurately estimate the three - dimensional animalism of real - world objects and environments , enabling elaborate digital replicas without the pauperism for extensive data collection .
Li , widely known as a “ Godmother of AI , ” discussed how motorcar can be train to recrudesce homo - like “ spatial intelligence ” in aTED talkearlier this twelvemonth .
“ Very little three - dimensional data survive in the creation , ” said one investor familiar with World Labs ’ plan of attack . “ Autonomous fomite party collect that data by driving thousands and thousands of miles to create three - dimensional data , which they then use to train their machines . In all other applications , like serve well burnt umber , there ’s no three - dimensional data . garner that data is expensive because the universe of places you have to collect data is tremendous . ”
Once available , World Labs ’ models can be used in gambling and robotics applications , she say .
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Li is best known for her work on ImageNet , a dataset that revolutionized computer vision . She is currentlyon fond leaveuntil December 2025 from her role as co - director of Stanford ’s Human - center on AI Institute .
