Renowned AI scholar and "AI godmother" Fei-Fei Li founded World Labs, a company focused on "spatial intelligence." In less than four months, the company's valuation reached $1 billion.

On Friday local time, the company announced that it had raised an additional $230 million in funding, further boosting its valuation.

The rapid rise and significant market valuation of World Labs demonstrate the capital market's expectations and trust in the "AI godmother" and its recognition of the technological concept and market potential of "spatial intelligence."

The new round of funding was led by a16z, NEA, and Radical Ventures, with participation from investment arms of renowned semiconductor companies such as AMD, Intel, and NVIDIA. Individually, AI luminaries such as Geoffrey Hinton, Jeff Dean, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman were also actively involved in World Labs' early-stage funding.

Following OpenAI's launch of ChatGPT in November 2022, World Labs is the latest AI startup to secure significant investment.

Founded in April this year, World Labs was co-founded by Fei-Fei Li and experts in computer vision and image technology, Justin Johnson, Christoph Lassner, and Ben Mildenhall. The company focuses on developing large language models capable of "perceiving, generating, and interacting with the 3D world." These models aim to estimate the 3D physical structure of real-world objects and environments, creating detailed digital replicas without requiring extensive data collection. The goal is to revolutionize machine perception and interaction with the real world.

Recently, Fei-Fei Li first detailed the concept of "spatial intelligence" at an event: visualization leads to insight, seeing leads to understanding, and understanding leads to action.

Fei-Fei Li, a professor at Stanford University and director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, has made significant contributions to the fields of computer vision and machine learning. She played a pivotal role in initiatives such as ImageNet and the ImageNet Challenge, which helped propel 2012 as the "Year of Deep Learning" and significantly advanced the development of deep learning and AI. As one of the most influential women and Chinese individuals in the AI field, she has earned the title of "AI godmother" for her remarkable contributions to both academia and industry.

The success of this funding round and the rapid rise and impressive market valuation of World Labs underscore the capital market's expectations and trust in the "AI godmother" and its recognition of the technological concept and market potential of "spatial intelligence."

The real world is 3D, and human spatial intelligence is built upon a very "native" ability to understand and manipulate 3D. The next step is to use World Labs to open the first chapter of the spatial intelligence and GenAI revolution.