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Fei-Fei Li, a Stanford University artificial intelligence leader, quietly launched a billion-dollar startup in just four months, joining the tech industry’s fierce race to commercialize technology.
Ms. Li, a computer scientist known as the “godmother of AI,” founded the company, called WorldLabs, in April, according to three people familiar with the matter.
The startup has already raised two rounds of funding from big tech investors including Andreessen Horowitz and AI fund Radical Ventures, who value the company at more than $1 billion, according to two of the people.
WorldLab raised about $100 million in its latest funding round, one of the people said.
Lee did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Andreessen Horowitz and Radical Ventures declined to comment.
World Labs is the latest AI startup to secure a big investment following OpenAI’s release of its ChatGPT chatbot in November 2022, sparking an explosion of investor interest in generative AI.
In the past three months alone, investors have poured more than $27 billion into U.S. AI startups, accounting for roughly half of all startup funding during that same period, according to PitchBook.
Lee founded WorldLab while on leave from Stanford University. He is co-director of the University of California’s Institute for Human-Centered AI, a research lab founded in 2019 that aims to use emerging technologies to improve human life.
Her business aims to create “spatial intelligence” in AI by processing visual data in a human-like way, and in April, Li gave a TED Talk in Vancouver about the possibility of machines being able to understand and navigate three-dimensional space.
This research represents a major advancement for AI, helping it interact with real-world environments and develop more sophisticated autonomous systems.
Lee rose to fame in the AI field with the development of ImageNet, a large-scale image dataset that advanced how computer vision techniques identify objects. Lee led AI at Google Cloud from 2017 to 2018, served on the board of directors of Twitter from 2020 to 2022, and currently serves as an advisor to the White House AI Task Force.
Vast repositories of labeled images have been essential for recent advances in AI, training self-driving cars to navigate environments, and training AI models to correctly identify objects from visual prompts.
Li’s vision for spatial intelligence is even more ambitious: training machines to understand the complex physical world and the relationships between objects in it.
“[World Labs] “He’s developing models that understand the three-dimensional physical world — the dimensions of objects, where things are and what they do,” said one venture capitalist familiar with Li’s work.
Among other AI groups garnering investor interest are a number of groups developing intelligent robots that can understand and navigate their physical environments.
Skilled, which is developing a “universal brain for the creation of a wide range of robots,” raised $300 million in funding last week from SoftBank, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ investment fund, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and others, giving it a valuation of $1.5 billion.
