Self-driving vehicle pioneer Odyssey, a world model AI startup founded by CEO Oliver Cameron and CTO Jeff Hawke, has raised a $310M Series B round led by Natural Capital with participation from Amazon, AMD Ventures, GV and others at a $1.45B valuation.
World models are the next big thing in AI beyond text- and chat-based large language models. They collect data from the physical world and simulate it with accurate physics. In the case of Odyssey, it mimicked how Google Earth collected data; Startup People were sent out with cameras strapped to their backs. (Google drives camera-equipped cars around.)
This approach makes sense given the background of the founders. Cameron was the co-founder and CEO of autonomous vehicle startup Voyage Acquired by GM Cruisewhere he later became Vice President of Product; hawk was an engineer Buzzy UK self-driving startup Wave.
Set in 2023, Odyssey now offers a handful of world models for a variety of use cases, from video-game creation to robotics. It is perhaps best known for creating rich, interactive videos from text prompts.
With Amazon’s support, the startup says AWS is now its preferred cloud provider and it will optimize its models to run on AWS’s Trenium chips, a competitor to Nvidia’s AI chips.
In addition to the VCs who participated in this unicorn-crowning round, Odyssey has also lined up an impressive list of angel investors. These include Jeff Dean, Elad Gil, Gary Tan, Guillermo Rauch and Cruise founder Kyle Vogt. The company has raised $337 million so far.
