Who is AI pioneer Fei-Fei Li? The startup unicorn World Labs secures funding with support from NVIDIA and AMD

Recently, American startup unicorn World Labs announced the completion of a new funding round worth one billion dollars, supported by AMD, Fidelity Asset Management, and others. NVIDIA even made an additional investment. World Labs CEO Fei-Fei Li, known as the “AI Godmother,” previously served as Google Cloud AI/ML Chief Scientist, Director of Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and co-founded Stanford’s “Human-Centered AI Institute” (HAI). World Labs aims to develop large-scale world models (LWM) to enable AI to interact with 3D worlds.

AI Godmother Fei-Fei Li founded Stanford’s “Human-Centered AI Institute”

Regarded as the “AI Godmother,” Fei-Fei Li has been a key driver in the development of artificial intelligence over the past two decades. Born in China and later immigrated to the United States, she is currently a professor of Computer Science at Stanford University. Li led the creation of the large image database ImageNet, which provided a critical training foundation for deep learning and computer vision, and is widely considered a milestone in the modern AI boom.

She has served as Google Cloud AI/ML Chief Scientist, Director of Stanford AI Laboratory (SAIL), and co-founded Stanford’s “Human-Centered AI Institute” (HAI), advocating for AI to focus on human needs and social impact.

Unicorn World Labs Enables AI to Understand 3D Worlds

In 2024, Fei-Fei Li founded the AI startup World Labs and serves as its CEO. The company positions itself as a cutting-edge foundational model research and product company, with the core goal of creating large-scale world models (LWM). The aim is to enable AI not just to speak and recognize images, but to understand, generate, reason, and interact within 3D worlds.

The models can understand 3D spatial structures and object relationships from images or videos, generate 3D scenes with freely movable viewpoints from text or images, and perform reasoning and simulation in virtual spaces, laying the foundation for robotic and physical AI behaviors.

The flagship product Marble has been publicly demonstrated, capable of generating highly realistic 3D worlds with spatial consistency from a single image, video, or text, and rendering in real-time within browsers. For example, inputting “modern kitchen” can produce a walkable, rotatable space; providing indoor photos allows the model to infer occluded areas and complete geometric structures.

World Labs’ latest funding round received support from NVIDIA and AMD

Since its founding, World Labs has rapidly gained support from the capital markets. In 2024, it became a billion-dollar valuation startup unicorn, raising $230 million. Investors include a16z, NEA, Radical Ventures, Nvidia, and others.

In February 2026, the company announced the completion of a new funding round of $1 billion. The official valuation was not disclosed, but external speculation suggests it could be worth several billion dollars. Major investors in this round include AMD, Nvidia (additional investment), Autodesk (committed $200 million and will serve as strategic advisor), Emerson, Fidelity Management & Research, Sea Group, and others.

This article about AI Godmother Fei-Fei Li and the startup unicorn World Labs’ funding supported by NVIDIA and AMD first appeared on Chain News ABMedia.