NEA has acquired $100 million from Fei-Fei Li’s new AI startup, which is now valued at over $1 billion

World Labs, a stealth startup founded by renowned Stanford University AI professor Fei-Fei Li, has raised two rounds of funding within two months of each other, according to multiple reports. The latest funding was led by NEA and valued the company at more than $1 billion, TechCrunch has learned from several people with knowledge of the investment. That round was valued at $100 million, which the Financial Times previously reported in July.

That was a significant increase in valuation from World Labs’ initial funding in April, which valued it at $200 million, one of the people said. Investors in the first round included Andreessen Horowitz and Canadian firm Radical Ventures, where Li is a research partner, Reuters reported in May. Li and NEA did not respond to requests for comment.

World Labs, which was reportedly founded in April and went from a founding to a unicorn in four months, suggests that investors will continue to bet big on AI startups founded by prominent AI scientists, even if the startups have unproven track records.

But in this case, what he’s working on is so hard to do, and it could be essential in the AI-driven world that Silicon Valley is frantically building. World Labs is working to build AI models that can accurately estimate the 3D physicality of real-world objects and environments, enabling detailed digital replicas without the need for extensive data collection.

Li, widely known as the “godmother of artificial intelligence,” discussed how machines could be taught to develop human-like “spatial intelligence” in her TED talk earlier this year.

“There’s very little 3-D data in the world,” says one investor familiar with World Labs’ approach. “Autonomous vehicle companies are collecting this data, traveling thousands of miles to create 3-D data that they then use to train their machines. In all the other applications, like serving coffee, there’s no 3-D data. Collecting this data is expensive because the universe of places where you have to collect data is so vast.”

She added that once the World Labs models are made available, they could be used in gaming and robotics.

Li is best known for her work on ImageNet, a dataset that revolutionized computer vision. She is currently on partial leave until December 2025 from her role as co-director of the Human-Centered AI Institute at Stanford University.