Odyssey AI raises $310M for world models, partners with AWS as Nvidia sits out Series B

Odyssey AI raises $310M, bets on Amazon over Nvidia

The world-models startup picked AWS, Amazon's Trainium chips and AMD Ventures for its $310M round, four months after Nvidia's venture arm backed it. The 'anyone-but-Nvidia' trade has reached Nvidia's own portfolio. Odyssey, an AI lab building real-time 'world models', has raised $310mn at a $1.45bn valuation. The more telling number is whose names are on the round. The Series B was led by Natural Capital, with Amazon, AMD Ventures, Google's GV, EQT and the CIA-linked fund In-Q-Tel taking part. As part of the deal, AWS becomes Odyssey's preferred cloud provider and supplies its Trainium chips. That matters because of who is missing. Just four months ago, Nvidia's venture arm, NVentures, backed Odyssey's Series A. Nvidia is nowhere in the Series B. A defection, or just a better deal Trainium is Amazon's in-house answer to Nvidia's grip on AI computing, built for the fast, high-volume workloads that real-time world simulation demands. Pairing it with money from AMD Ventures, Nvidia's main chip rival, makes the round read like a vote against the market leader. "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," said co-founder and chief executive Oliver Cameron. The honest caveat is that this is diversification, not a divorce. As Tech Funding News put it, it is unclear whether the switch reflects real conviction in Amazon's chips or simply better terms in a fierce market, and 'preferred cloud' is not 'exclusive'. Either way, it lands as buyers everywhere hunt for Nvidia alternatives, from China's carmakers designing their own chips to startups turning Nvidia GPUs into a commodity. From self-driving to simulating everything Odyssey was started in late 2023 by Cameron, a former Cruise and Voyage executive, and Jeff Hawke, a founding engineer at self-driving firm Wayve. Their pitch grew out of the core driverless-car problem: predicting what happens next so a machine can act on it. A world model tries to do that for everything, simulating persistent 3D environments trained on physics and cause-and-effect rather than text. A robotics company could run thousands of training scenarios inside Odyssey's simulation instead of on a real factory floor. Its roughly 55 staff, spread across Palo Alto, London and Zurich, include alumni of DeepMind, Tesla, Waymo and Apple. Recent projects include Odyssey-2 Max for physics simulation and Agora-1, which lets multiple agents act in one shared world. A crowded, deep-pocketed race The money reflects how hot the field has become. Runway reached a $5.3bn valuation after a $315mn round in February, Fei-Fei Li's World Labs raised $230mn, Google DeepMind's Genie model is already used at Waymo, and Yann LeCun's new lab is reportedly raising at a €3bn valuation before shipping a product. Odyssey's wager is steeper than most: about 55 people and roughly $27mn raised before this, betting on a technology that has yet to prove it pays. The presence of In-Q-Tel, and Odyssey's own mention of defence as a target use, is a reminder that whoever can convincingly simulate the world will have customers well beyond gaming.

Odyssey raises $310M at a $1.45B valuation to transform AI model simulation

Odyssey raises $310M at a $1.45B valuation to transform AI model simulation Odyssey, an artificial intelligence lab building world models, today announced it raised $310 million in early funding at a $1.45 billion valuation led by Natural Capital. Amazon.com Inc., AMD Ventures, GV, EQT, IQT and others also joined the Series B round. Existing investors also joined the round, including Elad Gil; Jeff Dean, Google LLC's chief scientist; Qasar Younis, co-founder and CEO of Applied Intuition Inc.; Garry Tan, president and CEO of Y Combinator Inc.; Guillermo Rauch, founder and CEO of Vercel Inc.; and Kyle Vogt, founder of Cruise LLC. In addition to the funding, Odyssey announced a new deal with Amazon Web Services Inc., which provides access to the company's Tranium custom silicon and instances as its preferred cloud provider. Tranium is AWS's family of silicon designed to assist with the training and deployment of AI models at scale. "We believe world models represent a new class of foundation model -- AI that can understand and simulate the world itself," said co-founder and Chief Executive Oliver Cameron. The last few years have seen numerous breakthroughs in scaling, interactivity, multimodality and physics simulation for AI models. This has come with a similar scale for generative AI model size, compute and performance needs. Cameron said partners across the industry are needed to push the frontier for general world models to achieve the GPT-3 moment for the field. "World models represent one of the most demanding workloads in AI -- they require massive compute throughput with tight latency constraints," said Ron Diamant, vice president and distinguished engineer at Amazon. "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." World models are AI systems designed to learn and simulate how the physical and digital world works. Instead of simply operating by recognizing patterns or predicting the next word, like a large language model, they build an internal representation of reality. This includes physics, causality and time. So, they are capable of simulating or predicting outcomes of actions before taking them. The resulting AI models created to predict environments and simulate physics are necessary for training physical AI agents, robotics, autonomous vehicles and other AI models that directly interact with the physical world. In many cases, having a world model to simulate the environment can increase the safety of deploying physical AI agents in robotics and cars, train them in days rather than months, and prepare them for unexpected conditions. Over the past three years, Odyssey has built its own world models to push the limits of research in the field. It released Odyssey-2 Max, which advanced the state of the art in physics accuracy for general world simulation. Starchild-1 introduced the first real-time multimodal world model and Agora-1 brought multi-agent interactivity within a shared world simulation. The category for world models is growing. In recent months, AI developer Decart.ai Inc. also raised $300 million at a nearly $4 billion valuation to develop a pair of world models, named Lucy and Oasis. AI pioneer Yann LeCun's startup AMI Labs raised $1.03 billion in March to train world models, and world model startup Runway AI Inc. raised $315 million in February. All of these startups face competition from the technology giant Google LLC, which introduced a tool called Project Genie. It allows developers to rapidly generate three-dimensional virtual environments using prompts, combining the company's powerful Nano Bana Pro image generator and Genie 3 world model into one package.

Amazon Teams With Newly-Minted Physical AI Unicorn Odyssey | PYMNTS.com

The tech giant took part in a $310 million funding round for Odyssey, which builds AI systems designed to simulate the physical world, the report said. The new funding values Odyssey, whose world models can create 3D environments, at $1.45 billion. As part of the partnership, Odyssey will use Amazon Web Services as its preferred cloud provider and employ the latest version of the company's Trainium chips. Odyssey's involvement would help boost Trainium's development, said Ron Diamant, a vice president at AWS, according to the report. "My goal is to be able to tell my son that I built the best AI accelerator in the world," he said, per the report. Odyssey is part of a small group of early-stage companies building models trained on physics and the relationships between objects to go beyond the language-based models driving most popular AI tools, the report said. World models represent a "second wave of AI" that revolutionizes industries like robotics, said Jay Zaveri, whose Natural Capital also invested in the round, according to the report. "We have taken a human brain-like construct and only taught it language," he said, per the report. Odyssey Co-Founder and CEO Oliver Cameron said in the report that the company's models "will have a much more complete understanding of the world  ... physics, body language, dynamics, all these things that exist in the world that language doesn't really capture." The new funding and partnership come as companies are looking to robots to fill worker shortages. "Companies are deploying AI-powered robots and autonomous equipment not to cut headcount, but because the headcount isn't there," PYMNTS reported Tuesday (June 16). Around the world, 72% of employers had difficulty finding the talent they required. That figure has remained above 70% for several years in a row. The situation is not likely to improve, as an estimated 30.4 million baby boomers will reach the traditional retirement age of 65 by 2030. People older than 65 in the United States accounted for 12.4% in 2007 and 17.9% in 2024. They are expected to represent 21.2% by 2035. "Employers will have to replace a lot of those vacancies one way or another," the report said. For all PYMNTS AI coverage, subscribe to the daily AI Newsletter.