Today is a big day for Odyssey: we’re thrilled to announce our $325M Series B at a $1.45B valuation led by Natural Capital, with participation from Amazon, AMD, GV, EQT, Axiom, In-Q-Tel, NVIDIA, and others. They join existing investors including Jeff Dean, Elad Gil, Qasar Younis, Kyle Vogt, Garry Tan, alongside researchers from OpenAI, DeepMind, MSL, Recursive, and Thinking Machines. This investment significantly accelerates our efforts to develop AI that can truly understand and simulate the world.

More than a decade ago, Jeff, myself, and our founding team began working on one of the most ambitious problems in AI: teaching cars to navigate the world at superhuman performance. In that process, we developed frontier systems that learned—albeit from the narrow perspective of the roadway—a rich model of the world, including physics, causality, dynamics, and human behavior. These systems demonstrated the immense power of world prediction as a path toward intelligence, and convinced us that the same underlying idea could be generalized far beyond autonomous systems.

Jeff and I founded Odyssey in 2023 to pursue this mission. We believed general world models—systems that understand and simulate the world—would become a new class of foundation model, ultimately revolutionizing robotics, science, healthcare, education, gaming, defense, and many other industries. Three years later, we have proven that thesis, with world models now demonstrating capabilities that extend far beyond autonomous driving.

With Odyssey-2 Max, we’ve materially advanced the state-of-the-art in physics-accuracy for general world simulation. With Starchild-1, we introduced the first real-time multimodal world model. With Agora-1, we introduced multi-agent interaction within a shared world simulation. With PROWL, we demonstrated how world models can improve through active exploration. Together, this research represents significant progress toward capable, general world models.

This progress has led Amazon to become more than an investor. As part of our partnership, Odyssey will be among a small number of companies with access to the latest Trainium chips, while working closely with Amazon on research and go-to-market efforts. Odyssey is the first world model company to receive this level of support from Amazon, and we couldn’t be more excited to collaborate with them.

The team and I are deeply grateful for the conviction our investors, partners, and broader community have shown in our work. We believe the field is approaching the GPT-3 moment for world models—the point where world models transition from a promising research direction into a breakthrough foundational technology. 

We’re still in the earliest days, but the opportunity ahead is enormous, and we couldn’t be more thrilled to explore what becomes possible when AI can understand and simulate the world.