Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs has secured a $200 million investment from software design giant Autodesk. The partnership will see the two companies collaborating to explore how World Labs’ models — AI systems that can generate and reason about immersive 3D environments — can work alongside Autodesk’s tools, and vice versa, starting with a focus on entertainment use cases.
The deal is part of a larger round for World Labs, according to Autodesk, which declined to disclose further details. World Labs, which emerged from stealth in 2024 with $230 million at a $1 billion valuation, is reportedly now in talks to raise capital at a $5 billion valuation.
World Labs did not immediately return a request for more details.
For World Labs, Autodesk’s investment is a signal that its product has commercial appeal. The startup’s first world model product, Marble, released last November, lets users create editable, downloadable 3D environments.
Autodesk is one of the biggest developers of 3D CAD (computer-aided design) software. Its platform underpins architectural, engineering, construction, manufacturing, and entertainment workflows. That focus on the built world makes investment in advanced spatial AI a natural extension of its core business.
Or as Li put it in a statement: “Autodesk has long helped people think spatially and solve real-world problems and, together, we share a clear purpose: building physical AI that augments human creativity and puts more powerful tools in the hands of designers, builders, and creators.”
As part of the deal, Autodesk will serve as an advisor to World Labs, and the two will collaborate at the “research and model level.”
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Daron Green, Autodesk’s chief scientist, told TechCrunch the partnership is still in its early days, so the precise form it’s going to take hasn’t been determined yet.
“You could anticipate us consuming their models or them consuming our models in different settings,” Green said.
He mused that customers might like to start with a world-model-based sketch in World Labs (say, of an office layout) and then drill down on certain design aspects …