World Labs is an AI research company building "spatial intelligence" or world models - AI systems that understand and generate 3D environments, in contrast to text-only large language models. It was founded in October 2023 by Fei-Fei Li, the Stanford AI professor widely known for creating the ImageNet dataset, alongside Justin Johnson, Ben Mildenhall, and Christoph Lassner.
World Labs announced a $1 billion funding round in February 2026, with backers including Nvidia, AMD, and Autodesk, bringing total funding to $1.23 billion across two rounds. Earlier reporting from January 2026 suggested the company was in discussions at a $5 billion valuation, though World Labs never publicly confirmed that specific figure, so it should be treated as a reported estimate rather than a settled fact.