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A company called World Labs has just raised $100 million at a $1 billion valuation. And this is just months after this whole thing really has gotten underway. So I want to dive into what this means for the industry, what they're currently working on over at World Labs, why this is so important. And again, I think this is just proof that companies are still putting very large bets on relatively new AI startups, which gives you the feeling that there is space for a lot of winners in this industry. And it's going to be interesting to see how this plays out. So let's get into it. Before we get into the episode, I wanted to say, if you are listening on YouTube, make sure to like and subscribe. And if you are on Apple or Spotify, if you could do me a huge favor and leave a review. It helps out in the algorithm, it helps me get found by more people. It makes a really big difference and I would really, really appreciate it if you haven't done that already. So let's get into exactly what is happening here. So this new round that has just been led is actually, or that has happened, is being led by nea, right? So we have one of the biggest venture capital firms, nea, leading this round. And this is Fifi Lee's AI startup now, Fifi Li. She's kind of. A lot of people call her like the godmother of AI. She is very prolific and she is actually a Stanford University AI professor. So this is now her second round of funding that she has raised. She raised not that long ago, back in April, I believe, from Andreessen Horowitz and another Canadian venture fund. And when they did that round, they were only raising the $200 million valuation, which even then was like, oh, my gosh, you know, it's like $200 million valuation. This company is a serious player. And just a few short months later and we're. And they're raising at a $1 billion valuation. So this is, this is obviously huge news. And being led by nea, this is one of the top tier venture capital firms. So what exactly does World Labs do? Why are they getting so much money? I mean, I think a really big part of this is who's behind. Obviously the biggest part of this is who's behind this. So having Fei Fei Li run this is obviously huge. Stanford University AI professor, she's been doing this for a long time. She's very prolific in the field. They want a backer. So what I think is very interesting though is that, you know, this is only, you know, Since April till now. I think it's about four months since it really took them to hit unicorn status. So people are still putting really big bets into these companies. I think this is very interesting. I don't think we're at the end. A lot of people are like, oh, my gosh, the AI bubble is pop, or moving on, when they see kind of the stock price that in video has had lately and kind of Nvidia's stock run, which has not been exactly, I don't know, fantastic as of late at least, people have been saying that, you know, today Nvidia is up 1.67%. In the last five days, they're up 15%. Nvidia is on an absolute tear. You know, people were kind of crap, shocking them a lot because over the last month they're down about 8% and they, they had quite a bit of a dive. And people said, okay, this is the AI bubble. The bubble is burst. Get ready for a stock market collapse. And then we just move, you know, a few, a couple of weeks later. And all of a sudden, this week alone, Nvidia is up almost 16%. For a company that has risen this much. Right. I mean, we're talking about in the last year, it's up 168% in the last five years, up 2800%. For a company that has risen this much, they had a bit of a dip, but they bounced back quite strong. I think they peaked in June at about $131 a share, and then they dropped after that all the way down to 104 and are now back up to about 118. So all this to say big bets are still being made in the, in the field, in the industry. Right. This isn't the end of AI and these venture funds and investors putting in huge sums of money. And I think what we're seeing with World Labs right now is a big indicator of that. Now, what exactly does World Labs do? So what I want to bring this back to is the reason why, I think something that I think did a lot of really good publicity, and that's the fact that during a TED talk recently, FIFA Lee did a whole TED talk about spatial intelligence. And, you know, I'm not going to play. I don't get copyright strike by ted. But essentially she talked a little bit about how AI is going to understand the real world and the role that spatial computing has in this, meaning, understanding, sort of a 3D view of everything that's going on. And this is what she's now building with World Labs. She said that this is a particularly difficult thing to do because in Silicon Valley this is not something that everyone is building for. Essentially you have to create an AI model that can accurately estimate three dimensional physicality of real world objects. Now you see this kind of with things like Apple maps I think is kind of when I first started noticing how cool this was. If you look at Apple maps, you go to a famous town like Paris, France and it would have on the map, you know, the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre and the Arc de Triomphe, except they're like 3D and you know, I remember first seeing those and being like, oh my gosh, this is so interesting, so cool. So you can see there's like business applications for software like that. But I think where a lot of people put this is, is like video games, creating 3D video games, creating 3D worlds for things like Apple's VR headset. And there's a lot of other also great use cases as far as medical training and other areas. But this is, it's a pretty tricky problem to solve because there's not a lot of data sets that actually collect this. Now they have mentioned that one of the big data sets is car self driving car companies like Tesla for example, they have millions of cameras all over the road taking different angles or companies like Waymo that have their, their, that have, you know, essentially sending out their, their X ray scans and getting a 3D image of what is around them. And so they're building these datasets but there's not a lot of other companies, so they're having to essentially create algorithms that can see an image and turn it into a 3D object and kind of create that. And specifically I think they're working on objects and environments. So essentially what they say is that they're going to be enabling detailed digital replicas without the need for extensive data collection. So you'll be able to create a digital replica of anything. And it's not going to need a ton of, a ton of data. Probably just a photo would suffice. You can make 3D renderings of anything. So this is really interesting. I think that a lot of this money and hype kind of got put into this as obviously Lee is very prolific. At Stanford, the godmother of AI had the nickname and had a very big TED talk that kind of went viral. And I think that was like a huge good marketing campaign for her to grow her company and get investors. It gets put in front of the right people. But this is what one investor that was kind of familiar with this, said very little three dimensional data exists in the world. 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. Right? Like, think about it. That, yeah, you'd have to. The entire universe, everything that exists, you guys are where you are trying to collect your data from. So once available, World Labs is going to be essentially used in gaming and then also robotics applications. Those are kind of the two big focuses that they have. Um, very, very excited to see where this goes. Lee, she's known for her work on imagenet, that is a dataset that really helped with computer vision. And she's currently stepping away from her role as co director of Stanford's Human Centered AI Institute until December of 2025. I'm not sure if that means like she's stepping away and like, okay, my startup doesn't work, then I'll come back. Or if that's like a formality or if she thinks she's going to keep working and doing both of them. At this point, she's raised over a hundred million dollars at a billion dollar valuation. I think she should stick with a company. But then again, you have people like Mustafa Suleiman who started Inflection Pie, raised a billion dollars and then kind of just sold the company for parts and moved over to Microsoft. So who knows? I mean, who knows? I could definitely be proven wrong, but I think they got the funding and they definitely have, you know, with Lee, they have the expertise. So I think this could be a really big area to focus on. This could be a really successful project and I'm excited to see how this goes. I'll definitely keep you up to date on everything. Thanks so much for tuning into the podcast. Hope you have an amazing rest of your day.