Odyssey, a global model AI startup founded by self-driving car pioneers CEO Oliver Cameron and CTO Jeff Hawke, has raised a $310 million Series B round at a $1.45 billion valuation led by Natural Capital, with participation from Amazon, AMD Ventures, GV and others.
World models are the next big thing in AI beyond large-scale text-based and chat-based language models. They collect data from the physical world and simulate it with accurate physics. For Odyssey, we mimicked the way Google Earth collects data. Startups sent out people with cameras strapped to their backs. (Google drives a car equipped with a camera.)
That approach makes sense given the founder’s background. Cameron was co-founder and CEO of Voyage, a self-driving car startup that was acquired by GM’s Cruise Company, where he later became vice president of product. Mr. Hawke was an engineer at Wayve, a popular self-driving startup in the UK.
Founded in 2023, Odyssey currently offers several world models for a variety of use cases, from video game creation to robotics. It’s probably best known for creating rich, interactive videos from text prompts.
With help from Amazon, the company says it now makes AWS its preferred cloud provider and will optimize its models to run on AWS’s Trainium chips, a competitor to Nvidia’s AI chips.
In addition to the VCs that participated in this unicorn’s crowning round, Odyssey also attracted an impressive list of angel investors. These include Jeff Dean, Elad Gil, Garry Tan, Guillermo Rauch, and Cruise founder Kyle Vogt. The company has raised $337 million to date.
