Exclusive: NEA led a $100M round into Fei-Fei Li’s new AI startup, now valued at over $1B

World Labs, a stealthy startup founded by renowned Stanford University AI professor Fei-Fei Li, has raised two rounds of financing two months apart, according to multiple reports. The latest financing was led by NEA and valued the company at over $1 billion, TechCrunch has learned from several people with knowledge of the investments. This was a $100 million round previously reported by the Financial Times in July.

This was a significant increase in valuation from World Labs’ initial financing, which took place in April, and valued World Labs at $200 million, one person said. Investors in the first round included Andreessen Horowitz and Canadian firm Radical Ventures, where Li is a scientific partner, Reuters reported in May. Li and NEA didn’t respond to a request for comment.

World Labs, which was reportedly founded in April and went from founding to unicorn in four months, suggests that investors continue to place large bets on AI startups founded by prominent AI scientists, even if the startups businesses are unproven. 

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

Li, widely known as a “Godmother of AI,” discussed how machines can be trained to develop human-like “spatial intelligence” in a TED talk earlier this year.

“Very little three-dimensional data exists in the world,” said one investor familiar with World Labs’ approach. “Autonomous vehicle companies collect that data by driving thousands and thousands of miles to create three-dimensional data, which they then use to train their machines. In all other applications, like serving coffee, there’s no three-dimensional data. Collecting that data is expensive because the universe of places you have to collect data is enormous.”

Once available, World Labs’ models can be used in gaming and robotics applications, she said.

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 Stanford’s Human-Centered AI Institute.