Odyssey, a world mannequin AI startup based by self-driving automobile pioneers CEO Oliver Cameron and CTO Jeff Hawke, has raised a $310 million Sequence B spherical at a $1.45B valuation led by Pure Capital, with Amazon, AMD Ventures, GV, and others taking part.
World fashions are the subsequent large factor in AI past text- and chat-based massive language fashions. They collect knowledge from the bodily world and simulate it with correct physics. In Odyssey’s case, it has mimicked how Google Earth gathered knowledge; the startup sent people out with cameras strapped to their backs. (Google drives camera-equipped vehicles round.)
That method is smart given the backgrounds of the founders. Cameron was the co-founder and CEO of autonomous automobile startup Voyage, which was acquired by GM’s Cruisethe place he later turned VP of product; Hawke was an engineer at buzzy U.K. self-driving startup Wayve.
Odyssey, based in 2023, now affords a handful of world fashions for quite a lot of use instances, from video-game creation to robotics. It’s maybe finest identified for producing wealthy, interactive video from textual content prompts.
With the backing from Amazon, the startup says AWS is now its most well-liked cloud supplier and it’ll optimize its fashions to run on AWS’s Trainium chips, a competitor to Nvidia’s AI chips.
Along with the VCs that participated on this unicorn-crowning spherical, Odyssey has corralled a formidable record of angel buyers as nicely. These embrace Jeff Dean, Elad Gil, Garry Tan, Guillermo Rauch, and Cruise founder Kyle Vogt. The corporate has now raised $337 million up to now.
