World Labs

World Labs is a frontier AI research and product company focused on spatial intelligence: building foundational world models that perceive, generate, reason about and interact with the 3D world. The company describes its models as translating 'seeing into doing' and targets applications spanning storytelling, creativity, design, simulation and immersive experiences in both virtual and physical environments. Third-party research describes the underlying systems as Large World Models (LWMs) that generate and render interactive three-dimensional environments in real time.

Its first product, Marble, generates spatially consistent, high-fidelity and persistent 3D worlds from multimodal inputs — text, images, video or 360-degree panoramas — as well as from explicit 3D layouts. Marble supports interactive editing of individual elements or entire scenes, expansion and combination of generated worlds into larger environments, and export in a range of 2D and 3D formats for integration into existing production pipelines. Marble incorporates RTFM (Real-Time Frame Model), a generative world model that produces video in real time as a user interacts with it, and worlds are explorable directly in the browser with six-degrees-of-freedom navigation. A companion resource hub, Marble Labs, hosts case studies, tutorials, documentation and a community showcase.

The company has extended beyond content creation into robotics. In July 2026 it acquired SceniX, a robotics company, stating that the next breakthroughs in robotics will come from combining spatial intelligence, world models, learning-based simulation and a closed loop with real-world learning; accompanying material describes real-to-sim-to-real (R2S2R) pipelines for training and evaluating robot policies.

Founding story

World Labs was founded in January 2024 by Fei-Fei Li (co-founder and CEO), Justin Johnson, Christoph Lassner and Ben Mildenhall. Li, a Stanford professor of computer science and co-director of the Human-Centered AI Institute, previously directed Stanford's AI Lab and served as chief scientist of AI/ML at Google Cloud, and is known for creating ImageNet. Prior to founding the company she framed spatial intelligence as the next foundational unsolved problem for AI. Johnson, who studied under Li and worked at the University of Michigan and Facebook AI Research, collaborated with her on methods for AI systems to generate and reason about 3D space; according to Contrary Research the shared vision crystallized in early 2023 during a dinner with Andreessen Horowitz partner Martin Casado. Lassner (previously Meta Reality Labs and Epic Games, creator of the Pulsar differentiable renderer) and Mildenhall (previously Google Research, co-creator of NeRF) were then recruited for their rendering and spatial reasoning expertise.

Business model

World Labs develops proprietary foundation ('large world') models and commercializes them through products rather than licensing research. Its first product, Marble, is a generative 3D world creation tool used in-browser, supported by Marble Labs resources (tutorials, documentation, case studies, community showcase). In January 2026 the company added the World API, a public API that exposes Marble's world-generation capabilities to third-party applications, indicating a combined direct-product and developer-platform approach. Sources reviewed do not disclose pricing or contract structures.

Not disclosed in the available sources. Products include the Marble application and the World API, but no pricing, subscription tiers or revenue figures are stated.

Traction

Marble launched in limited beta in September 2025 and became generally available on November 12, 2025, with a public API following in January 2026. The company maintains a community showcase and case-study library documenting production workflows built on Marble. Contrary Research reported 42 employees as of December 2025, while Startup Intros lists an employee band of 1,001-5,000. Investor participation announced in February 2026 includes strategic corporates AMD, Autodesk, NVIDIA and Sea; Cisco is separately cited as an investor in secondary coverage.

Latest developments

In February 2026 World Labs announced $1 billion in new funding from investors including AMD, Autodesk, Emerson Collective, Fidelity Management & Research Company, NVIDIA and Sea, stating the capital would accelerate work on world models for storytelling, creativity, robotics and scientific discovery. In January 2026 it launched the World API; in April 2026 it published Spark 2.0, a streamable level-of-detail system for 3D Gaussian Splatting on the web; and in June 2026 it published a functional taxonomy of world models. On July 21, 2026 it announced the acquisition of robotics company SceniX, followed on July 28, 2026 by material on real-to-sim-to-real robot training and a conversation between Fei-Fei Li, Yunzhu Li and Martin Casado on the acquisition and robotics simulation.