Insider Brief
- Odyssey has raised $310 million in a Series B round that values the startup at $1.45 billion, with participation from investors including Natural Capital, Amazon, AMD Ventures, GV and EQT.
- The company develops AI worldmodels designed to simulate and predict how people, objects and environments interact, with potential applications in robotics, autonomous systems, science and gaming.
- Odyssey also announced a strategic relationship with Amazon Web Services and highlighted recent research efforts in physics-based simulation, real-time multimodal world models, multi-agent environments and active exploration.
Odyssey has raised $310 million in a Series B funding round that values the world-models AI startup at $1.45 billion.
The round was led by Natural Capital, with participation from Amazon, AMD Ventures, GV, EQT and IQT, along with a group of existing investors that includes former Cruise founder Kyle Vogt, Applied Intuition CEO Qasar Younis and Google’s chief scientist, Jeff Dean, according to Odyssey.
Founded by veterans of the autonomous vehicle industry, Odyssey is developing AI systems that go beyond language and image generation by modeling how objects, people and environments interact over time. The company said it believes those capabilities could eventually support applications in robotics, science, healthcare, gaming and autonomous systems.
“We believe world models represent a new class of foundation model — AI that can understand and simulate the world itself,” said co-founder and Odyssey CEO Oliver Cameron said in the announcement. “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.”
Alongside the funding announcement, Odyssey said it has entered into a strategic relationship with Amazon Web Services, which will become the company’s preferred cloud provider. Odyssey plans to use AWS infrastructure, including Trainium AI chips, to train and deploy its models.
“World models represent one of the most demanding workloads in AI — they require massive compute throughput with tight latency constraints,” noted 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.”
Odyssey said its recent research has focused on improving the realism and capabilities of world models. Projects include Odyssey-2 Max, which improved physics-based simulation; Starchild-1, a real-time multimodal world model; Agora-1, which enabled multiple AI agents to operate in a shared simulation; and PROWL, which explored how world models can learn through active exploration.
