Odyssey announced that it has raised $310 million in Series B funding at a $1.45 billion valuation to accelerate the development and deployment of its world model technology. The round was led by Natural Capital, with participation from Amazon, AMD Ventures, GV, EQT, In-Q-Tel, and others. Existing investors include Jeff Dean, Elad Gil, Qasar Younis, Garry Tan, Guillermo Rauch, and Kyle Vogt.
Odyssey is an AI lab focused on developing general world models, which are causal and multimodal systems designed to predict, simulate, and interact with the world over long horizons. The company was founded by self-driving car veterans and has assembled a research team with experience from DeepMind, Tesla, Waymo, Meta, Apple, and Wayve.
The company said that world models represent a new class of foundation models capable of understanding and simulating physical environments. Potential applications include robotics, gaming, science, healthcare, education, defense, and other fields where AI systems need to model dynamic real-world conditions.
Alongside the funding, Odyssey announced a new agreement with Amazon Web Services, which will become the company’s preferred cloud provider. Odyssey said the partnership will support the compute demands of world model development, including workloads requiring high throughput, low latency, and strong price-performance.
Odyssey plans to use AWS Trainium chips alongside other chips. The companies also plan to collaborate on future research and go-to-market efforts to make use cases for world models more accessible to customers.
Over the last three years, Odyssey has advanced a series of research projects in world simulation. Odyssey-2 Max improved physics accuracy for general world simulation. Starchild-1 introduced a real-time multimodal world model. Agora-1 added multi-agent interaction to a shared-world simulation. And PROWL demonstrated how world models can improve through active exploration.
The funding will help Odyssey scale its research efforts, expand infrastructure, and bring its world model technology to broader commercial and scientific use cases.
KEY QUOTES:
“We believe world models represent a new class of foundation model—AI that can understand and simulate the world itself.”
“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.”
Oliver Cameron, Co-Founder and CEO of Odyssey
“World models represent one of the most demanding workloads in AI—they require massive compute throughput with tight latency constraints.”
“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.”
Ron Diamant, Vice President and Distinguished Engineer at Amazon
“At Natural Capital, we invest behind ambitious technical teams building what comes next.”
“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.”
Jay Zaveri, General Partner at Natural Capital
