Odyssey, the world model AI startup founded by autonomous vehicle veterans Oliver Cameron and Jeff Hawke, has closed a $310 million Series B round at a $1.45 billion valuation. The round was led by Natural Capital, with Amazon, AMD Ventures, and GV among the participants. The company has now raised $337 million in total.
World models represent a significant frontier beyond large language models, training on real-world physical data to simulate environments with accurate physics. Odyssey’s approach mirrors how Google Earth gathered geographic data, deploying people with body-mounted cameras to capture real-world environments at scale. The startup now offers models spanning video game creation, robotics, and interactive video generation from text prompts.
Cameron previously co-founded autonomous vehicle startup Voyage, which was acquired by GM’s Cruise, where he later served as VP of product. Hawke was an engineer at UK self-driving startup Wayve. Their backgrounds in physical-world AI underpin Odyssey’s data-gathering methodology.
The Amazon investment brings a strategic dimension: AWS becomes Odyssey’s preferred cloud provider, with the startup committing to optimise its models for Amazon’s Trainium AI chips, positioning them as an alternative to Nvidia’s hardware. Angel investors in the round include Jeff Dean, Elad Gil, Garry Tan, Guillermo Rauch, and Cruise founder Kyle Vogt.
