Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs reportedly raising funding at $5B valuation, per Bloomberg. Some reports saying they will raise upto $500M. If it happens, the round would reprice World Labs from about $1B in 2024, when it raised $230M coming out of stealth. The bet is that “world models” can generate editable 3D environments that other software can build on, not just flat images or text. Earlier 3D pipelines usually start from hand-built polygon meshes, where scenes are made from lots of tiny triangles and then rendered. World Lab's Marble uses 3D Gaussian splatting (3DGS), which represents a scene as millions of semi-transparent points that can render with higher visual detail. It also outputs “collider meshes,” which are lower-detail shapes that trade looks for speed in physics and robotics simulation. Marble’s Chisel tool lets users block out objects from simple shapes and then generate styled variants, which is a step toward controllable world building. World Labs also just opened a World API so developers can generate explorable 3D worlds from text, images, and video inside apps. --- bloomberg .com/news/articles/2026-01-23/fei-fei-li-s-ai-startup-world-labs-in-funding-talks-at-5-billion-valuation
