AI pioneer Fei-Fei Li's World Labs raises $1 billion in new funding round

What Happened

On February 18, 2026, World Labs announced it had raised $1 billion in new funding. Autodesk, the company behind AutoCAD and other professional design software, led the round with a $200 million investment and announced a strategic partnership to integrate World Labs' technology into its design tools. Other backers joining the round include chip manufacturers Nvidia and AMD, asset manager Fidelity Management and Research, social impact fund Emerson Collective, and Sea. Bloomberg previously reported that World Labs was in funding discussions at a valuation of approximately $5 billion -- a figure the company itself has not confirmed.

The raise is a dramatic step up from where World Labs stood just 18 months ago. The company emerged from stealth in September 2024 with $230 million and a valuation of roughly $1 billion. The new round, if the reported valuation holds, would represent a roughly fivefold increase in that time.

World Labs was co-founded by Fei-Fei Li, a Stanford professor and former Chief Scientist of AI and Machine Learning at Google Cloud. She is perhaps best known for creating ImageNet in 2009 -- a massive library of labeled photographs that became the training ground for a generation of AI systems. When a deep neural network won the ImageNet competition in 2012, it set off the chain of events that eventually produced the AI tools people use today. In the research community, Li is often called the "godmother of AI."

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Why It Matters

World Labs is building what its team calls "spatial intelligence" -- AI that can reason about and generate three-dimensional environments rather than just text or flat images. Its flagship product, Marble, launched in November 2025, allows users to create detailed, navigable 3D spaces from text descriptions, photographs, or video. The environments include realistic lighting and physics simulation, and can be exported for use in other software.

The simplest way to understand the gap Marble is trying to close: today's most powerful AI can write a novel, translate a legal document, or generate a photorealistic image. What it struggles to do is build you a room you can walk around in -- one that behaves like a real space, with corners that turn correctly, light that falls believably, and objects that sit on surfaces rather than floating. Spatial intelligence is the attempt to fix that.

The Autodesk partnership is the detail that separates this raise from a purely research story. Autodesk's tools are used by architects, engineers, filmmakers, and product designers worldwide. A commitment from Autodesk to bring World Labs' models into its software -- starting with entertainment industry applications -- means this technology is on a path toward professional workflows where people create real things for real clients. That is a different kind of validation than a research paper or a polished demo.

Li's stated aim is ambitious: "building physical AI that augments human creativity and puts more powerful tools in the hands of designers, builders and creators." World Labs has named robotics and scientific discovery alongside creative industries as target markets. The participation of Nvidia and AMD as investors is a signal in itself -- chipmakers invest where they expect demand for computing power to grow.

The competitive landscape is taking shape. World Labs competes in the emerging "world models" category with AMI Labs, the venture led by Yann LeCun, Meta's former Chief AI Scientist and another prominent figure in the field. LeCun has long argued that AI cannot reach human-level reasoning until it can model the physical world the way humans do.

A note on the numbers: the $5 billion valuation figure comes from Bloomberg's reporting on pre-round discussions, not from World Labs. The company did not disclose a valuation. Readers should treat it as an estimate until confirmed.