Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs has secured a $200 million investment from software design giant Autodesk. This investment is part of a larger $1 billion funding round from backers that include AMD, Emerson Collective, Fidelity, and Nvidia.
World Labs emerged from stealth in 2024 with $230 million at a $1 billion valuation. The company declined to say whether this latest funding round boosted its valuation. However, reports from a month ago suggested it was aiming to raise at a $5 billion valuation.
The partnership will see the two companies collaborating to explore how World Labs’ AI models can work alongside Autodesk’s tools, and vice versa. These AI systems can generate and reason about immersive 3D environments. The collaboration will start with a focus on entertainment use cases.
For World Labs, Autodesk’s investment signals that its product has commercial appeal. The startup’s first world model product, called Marble, was released last November. It lets users create editable, downloadable 3D environments.
Autodesk is one of the biggest developers of 3D computer-aided design software. Its platform underpins architectural, engineering, construction, manufacturing, and entertainment workflows. That focus on the built world makes investment in advanced spatial AI a natural extension of its core business.
As Fei-Fei Li stated, “Autodesk has long helped people think spatially and solve real-world problems and, together, we share a clear purpose: building physical AI that augments human creativity and puts more powerful tools in the hands of designers, builders, and creators.”
As part of the deal, Autodesk will serve as an advisor to World Labs, and the two will collaborate at the research and model level. Daron Green, Autodesk’s chief scientist, said the partnership is still in its early days, so the precise form it will take hasn’t been determined yet.
He explained that customers might start with a world-model-based sketch in World Labs, such as an office layout, and then drill down on specific design aspects using Autodesk’s technology. Conversely, a user might take an object designed in Autodesk’s platform and place it into a context created through one of World Labs’ prompts. Green added that data sharing is not part of the agreement.
The companies plan to start with media and entertainment use cases. Most companies building world models, including Google DeepMind and Runway, see gaming and interactive entertainment as an initial go-to-market strategy. Autodesk already works with most major media production companies and has been training models for character animation, which Green notes are close to world models.
The partnership supports Autodesk’s broader push to integrate more AI features across its software portfolio. The company is developing “neural CAD,” a new kind of generative AI model trained on geometric data that can reason about components and entire systems to generate working 3D models.
Autodesk’s neural CAD models are already being integrated into the firm’s product design and architecture software. World Labs’ models could help extend that capability beyond individual design files toward more holistic digital representations of the physical world.
Green believes different AI systems, including large language models, world models, and neural CAD, will be combined in the future to improve designs for customers.
As Li concluded, “If AI is to be truly useful, it must understand worlds, not just words. Worlds are governed by geometry, physics, and dynamics, and reconciling the semantic, spatial, and physical is the next great frontier of AI.”
This article was originally published February 18, 2026 and has been updated to include more details on World Labs’ raise.