Odyssey, a world model AI startup founded by self-driving vehicle pioneers CEO Oliver Cameron and CTO Jeff Hawke, has raised a $310 million Series B round at a $1.45B valuation led by Natural Capital with Amazon, AMD Ventures, GV and others participating.

World models are the next big thing in AI beyond text- and chat-based large language models. They gather data from the physical world and simulate it with accurate physics. In Odyssey’s case, it has mimicked how Google Earth gathered data; the startup sent people out with cameras strapped to their backs. (Google drives camera-equipped cars around.)

That approach makes sense given the backgrounds of the founders. Cameron was the co-founder and CEO of autonomous vehicle startup Voyage, which was acquired by GM’s Cruise, where he later became VP of product; Hawke was an engineer at buzzy UK self-driving startup Wayve.

Odyssey, founded in 2023, 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 producing rich, interactive video from text prompts.

With the backing from Amazon, the startup says AWS is now its preferred cloud provider and it will optimize its models to run on AWS’s Trainium chips, a competitor to Nvidia’s AI chips.

In addition to the VCs that participated in this unicorn-crowning round, Odyssey has corralled an impressive list of angel investors as well. These include Jeff Dean, Elad Gil, Garry Tan, Guillermo Rauch, and Cruise founder Kyle Vogt. The company has now raised $337 million to date.

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