Odyssey hits $1.45B valuation with Amazon backing, bringing physical-world AI to the mainstream

Odyssey, a startup building AI models that simulate the physical world, has closed a $310 million Series B round at a $1.45 billion valuation. The round was led by Natural Capital, with participation from Amazon, AMD Ventures, GV, and others. The company, founded in 2023 by self-driving veterans Oliver Cameron and Jeff Hawke, is betting that world models - AI systems trained on real-world data to accurately replicate physics and environments - will be the next major wave in artificial intelligence, moving beyond text and chatbots.

Cameron previously co-founded autonomous vehicle startup Voyage, later acquired by Cruise, where he served as VP of product. Hawke was an engineer at UK self-driving firm Wayve. Their experience shows in Odyssey's approach: instead of relying on synthetic data, the company sends people into the field with cameras strapped to their backs, similar to how Google Earth captured street-level imagery. The result is a handful of world models tailored for applications ranging from video game creation to robotics, including generating rich, interactive video from text prompts.

Amazon's involvement also means AWS is now Odyssey's preferred cloud provider, and the startup will optimize its models to run on AWS's Trainium chips, positioning itself as a competitor to Nvidia's hardware dominance. The company has raised $337 million to date, with an impressive list of angel investors including Jeff Dean, Elad Gil, Garry Tan, Guillermo Rauch, and Cruise founder Kyle Vogt.

Source: TechCrunch