AI world model startup Odyssey lands $310m in Series B

Odyssey, an AI research company focusing on world models, has completed a $310m Series B funding round at a valuation of $1.45bn.

The round was led by Natural Capital, with participation of Amazon, GV, AMD Ventures, IQT, EQT, and additional investors.

Existing backers of Odyssey include Jeff Dean, Google’s chief scientist, Elad Gil, Qasar Younis of Applied Intuition, Garry Tan of Y Combinator, Guillermo Rauch of Vercel, and Kyle Vogt of Cruise.

Odyssey plans to use the new funding to expedite its research activities and expand the application of its AI world model technology.

Founded in 2023, Odyssey’s executive team includes several veterans of the autonomous vehicle sector.

Natural Capital general partner Jay Zaveri said: “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.”

As part of its developments, Odyssey has formed a partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS), naming the latter as its preferred cloud provider.

The company will make use of a range of chips from AWS, including AWS Trainium, designed for high-performance AI workloads.

Odyssey plans to optimise its world models on AWS’s infrastructure. The parties will also work on joint research and commercial initiatives.

Amazon vice president and distinguished engineer Ron Diamant said: “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 optimising their models on our silicon, and work together to help accelerate applications in robotics, gaming, science, and beyond.”

Over the past three years, Odyssey is said to have produced several research milestones. These include Odyssey-2 Max, which advanced the accuracy of physics-based world simulation, alongside the real-time multimodal world model Starchild-1.

Odyssey also introduced Agora-1 to enable multi-agent interaction and developed PROWL to explore improvements through active exploration techniques.

Odyssey co-founder and CEO Oliver Cameron said: “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.”