General Intuition, a New York-based startup that builds foundational models to train AI agents how to travel through time and space, is in talks to raise about $300 million, people familiar with the matter told TechCrunch.
The raise comes eight months after General Intuition spun out of Medal, a platform for uploading and sharing video game clips, in a $134 million seed round. The new funding brings the company’s valuation to more than $2 billion, according to people familiar with the matter.
Sources tell TechCrunch that General Intuition has secured funding from backers including Jeff Bezos and Eric Schmidt, in addition to existing investors Khosla Ventures and General Catalyst.
Medal co-founder Pim de Witte, along with co-founders Eloy Alonso, Adam Gerry and Vincent Micheli, founded and leads General Intuition, a research firm that brings global modeling and simulation expertise.
The startup uses Medal’s dataset, which includes 2 billion videos per year from 10 million monthly active users, to train its embodied AI and world models. The startup’s pitch is that such datasets (unique in that AI can learn from interactive, first-person gameplay) are the perfect foundation for teaching machines deep spatiotemporal reasoning, allowing them to perceive, predict, and interact in real-time in simulations.
The dataset reportedly caught the attention of OpenAI, which had previously attempted to win the Medal. And sources say OpenAI isn’t the only thing major AI labs have knocked out.
The global modeling space that General Intuition is a part of is heating up. Startups like Runway, Descart, and World Labs have all recently released world models, and Google’s Genie 3 recently started integrating Google Maps data to provide more real-world simulation capabilities.
While these companies all see gaming and robot training as short-term commercial use cases, General Intuition takes a different approach. In other words, we’re building world models to train agents, not to sell agents. The agent is the product, and the startup’s unique dataset gives it a path to survival.
General Intuition plans to use the funding to expand computing power and release new products by late summer or early fall, the people said.
If you buy through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This does not affect editorial independence.
