Fei-Fei Li, chief executive officer and co-founder of World Labs, speaks during the 2026 Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, Nevada, U.S., January 5, 2026. (Photo: VCG)

Prominent computer scientist Fei-Fei Li's World Labs raised $1 billion in a funding round as the startup accelerates efforts to advance "spatial intelligence."

On Wednesday, the startup said the investors included chip companies AMD and Nvidia, software firm Autodesk, Emerson Collective, Fidelity Management & Research Company, and Sea, among others.

Autodesk invested $200 million in World Labs and will serve as an adviser to the startup, according to the design software maker.

Spatial intelligence, a novel approach to AI, is the ability to reason about how the 3D world works – rather than relying on 2D data such as flat images or text. World Labs' foundational models can perceive, generate, and interact with the 3D world.

Widely known as the "godmother of AI," Li raised $230 million in September 2024 to launch World Labs.

Li has said that spatial intelligence models could be used in the future for augmented and virtual reality or robotics.

World Labs, along with Google DeepMind and other startups, is working on so-called "world models" that process visual data from the surrounding physical environment to develop advanced reasoning.

Yann LeCun, formerly Meta's chief AI scientist, left the parent company of Facebook to launch his startup, AMI Labs, which will focus on developing AI systems using world models.

Google DeepMind's Genie family of models can generate and simulate 3D environments. Similarly, World Labs has said its Marble multimodal world model creates 3D worlds from image or text prompts.