Natural Capital, Amazon, AMD Ventures, GV, EQT and In-Q-Tel (IQT) invest in world model leader

Odyssey, an AI lab pioneering world models founded by self-driving car veterans, today announced a $310 million Series B at a $1.45 billion valuation. Natural Capital led the round, with participation from Amazon, AMD Ventures, GV, EQT, IQT and others. They join existing investors including Jeff Dean, Google’s chief scientist; Elad Gil; Qasar Younis, co-founder and CEO of Applied Intuition; Garry Tan, president and CEO of Y Combinator; Guillermo Rauch, founder and CEO of Vercel; and Kyle Vogt, founder of Cruise.

Odyssey has announced a new deal with Amazon Web Services (AWS), which will become the company’s preferred cloud provider. As a leading world model provider, Odyssey requires compute designed for speed and quality. In addition to other chips, Odyssey will also use AWS Trainium chips, which are purpose-built to deliver these performance advantages. Both Odyssey and AWS share a conviction that Trainium will enable industry-leading price performance, and the companies will collaborate on future research and go-to-market efforts to make these use cases more accessible to customers.

“We believe world models represent a new class of foundation model—AI that can understand and simulate the world itself,” said Oliver Cameron, Co-Founder and CEO of Odyssey. “The last few years have seen major breakthroughs in scaling, interactivity, multimodality, and physics accuracy, and the field is now advancing extremely quickly. This round provides the compute, infrastructure, and partners to push the frontier of general world models, and to achieve a GPT-3 moment for the field.”

“World models represent one of the most demanding workloads in AI—they require massive compute throughput with tight latency constraints,” said Ron Diamant, Vice President and Distinguished Engineer at Amazon. “Odyssey’s team has been pushing the boundaries of what’s possible in this space, and Trainium is purpose-built for exactly this kind of scale. We’re excited to support this next phase of growth with AWS as Odyssey’s preferred cloud provider, collaborate on optimizing their models on our silicon, and work together to help accelerate applications in robotics, gaming, science, and beyond.”

Over the last three years, Odyssey has pushed the limits of research in this nascent, growing area. Odyssey-2 Max materially advanced the state-of-the-art in physics-accuracy for general world simulation. Starchild-1 introduced the first real-time multimodal world model. Agora-1 launched multi-agent interaction within a shared world simulation. With PROWL, Odyssey demonstrated how world models can improve through active exploration. Together, this research represents significant progress toward capable, general world models.

“At Natural Capital, we invest behind ambitious technical teams building what comes next,” said Jay Zaveri, General Partner at Natural Capital. “We developed deep conviction in Odyssey’s research direction, technical leadership, and execution, which made this our largest investment to date. We believe they have the potential to help define AI beyond language models.”

The funding will accelerate Odyssey’s research and broader deployment of its world model technology.

Source: BUSINESS WIRE