Odyssey raises $310M at $1.45B for world models with Amazon backing

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 $1.45 billion valuation. The round was led by Natural Capital, with participation from Amazon, AMD Ventures, GV, and others. World models go beyond text-based LLMs by gathering data from the physical world and simulating it with accurate physics. Odyssey's approach mimics how Google Earth gathered data: the startup sends people out with cameras strapped to their backs, capturing real-world environments. This method leverages the founders' deep expertise in autonomous vehicles—Cameron co-founded Voyage (acquired by Cruise), and Hawke was an engineer at Wayve. Since its founding in 2023, Odyssey has developed a handful of world models for video-game creation and robotics, and is best known for generating rich, interactive video from text prompts.

With Amazon's backing, Odyssey has named AWS its preferred cloud provider and will optimize its models to run on AWS's Trainium chips, a competitor to Nvidia's AI hardware. The company also attracted an impressive list of angel investors, including Jeff Dean, Elad Gil, Garry Tan, Guillermo Rauch, and Cruise founder Kyle Vogt. Total funding to date stands at $337 million. The round underscores the growing investor interest in world models as the next frontier in AI, promising to bridge the gap between digital simulation and physical reality for applications ranging from gaming to robotics and autonomous systems.