Jun 30, 2026Industry
VCs poured $3 billion into world models this year
Illustration: Splats Newsroom · Industry
Venture investors committed more than $3 billion to world model startups in the first half of 2026, Forbes reports.
By the numbers:
- Yann LeCun's AMI raised a $1.03 billion seed round at a $3.5 billion valuation — described as the largest seed round in European history.
- Fei-Fei Li's World Labs raised $1 billion in February at a $5.4 billion post-money valuation.
- Odyssey closed a $310 million Series B at a $1.45 billion valuation; Decart raised $300 million at $4 billion.
- General Intuition is reportedly in talks for $300 million at about $2 billion.
- NVIDIA and Amazon are among the key investors — NVIDIA has made over $40 billion in AI equity commitments in 2026.
The big picture: Capital is flowing to spatial and world-model AI at a scale previously reserved for LLM labs. These are the models whose native outputs are 3D scenes, splats, and simulated environments — the infrastructure bet under everything this site covers.
