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As venture deals drop for women-founded tech companies, the “godmother of AI” is building a billion dollar artificial intelligence startup that just raised hundreds of millions of dollars.
Fei-Fei Li, a pioneer of the AI industry, has raised $230 million for her AI startup, World Labs, which launched on Friday. The startup, which defines itself as “a spatial intelligence AI company,” was founded by Lei and fellow “world-renowned” technologists Justin Johnson, Christoph Lassner, and Ben Mildenhall.
The $230 million funding was led by investors at Andreessen Horowitz, NEA, and Radical Ventures, the startup said. Other investors include Salesforce (CRM-2.98%) co-founder Marc Benioff, LinkedIn (MSFT-1.72%) co-founder Reid Hoffman, and chipmaker Nvidia’s (NVDA-3.69%) venture capital arm, NVentures.
The spatial intelligence startup plans to build “large world models,” or LWMs, that use data such as images to generate 3D “worlds” that users can interact with and control. World Labs says the models can be useful for creatives and professionals such as artists and engineers.
“We aim to lift AI models from the 2D plane of pixels to full 3D worlds - both virtual and real - endowing them with spatial intelligence as rich as our own,” World Labs said.
In July, it was reported that World Labs was already worth $1 billion. Li’s contributions to the AI industry include inventing ImageNet, a dataset used to advance computer vision and in deep learning, that is considered a catalyst for the current AI boom. She is also co-director of Stanford’s Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence Institute, the former director of Stanford’s AI Lab, former vice president and chief scientist of AI/ML at Google (GOOGL-2.61%) and Google Cloud, and co-founder and chair of non-profit AI4ALL.
Li joined the government’s Artificial Intelligence Safety and Security Board in April, where she and dozens of other industry leaders will advise the Department of Homeland Security on preventing harm while implementing AI in critical infrastructure such as the power grid and transportation.