Odyssey, an AI lab that builds world models, raised a $310m Series B at a $1.45bn valuation, the company announced on 17 June 2026. Natural Capital led the round. Amazon, GV, AMD Ventures, EQT and IQT were among the other participants.
TechCrunch reported total funding of $337m. The company said the new money will significantly accelerate its work on world models, and it did not break the use of funds down further.
“We believe they have the potential to help define AI beyond language models.”Jay Zaveri, General Partner, Natural Capital
What Odyssey builds
World models are AI systems that understand and simulate the world. Odyssey was founded in 2023 by Oliver Cameron and Jeff Hawke, who are chief executive and chief technology officer and both come from self-driving vehicles: TechCrunch notes that Cameron co-founded Voyage and that Hawke was an engineer at Wayve.
The company says it builds general world models with applications in robotics, science, healthcare, education, gaming and defense. Its products include Odyssey-3, Agora-2, PROWL-2 and Starchild-1. TechCrunch describes it as best known for generating interactive video from text prompts, and says its models are used for areas such as video-game creation and robotics.
Neither the company nor TechCrunch gave a headcount.
The Amazon deal
Amazon Web Services will be Odyssey's preferred cloud provider, and Odyssey is working with Amazon's Annapurna Labs to optimise its models for AWS Trainium chips. Ron Diamant, a vice president and distinguished engineer at Amazon, said world models "represent one of the most demanding workloads in AI".
TechCrunch said the same about the AWS arrangement, and noted that the round was backed by Amazon and other large names.
Who invested
The round's lead, Natural Capital, was represented by general partner Jay Zaveri, who said: "We believe they have the potential to help define AI beyond language models." GV partner Luna Schmid said world models are now a multi-billion-dollar category.
Existing investors named by Odyssey include Jeff Dean, Elad Gil, Qasar Younis, Kyle Vogt and Garry Tan, as well as researchers from OpenAI, DeepMind and Thinking Machines. TechCrunch also lists Guillermo Rauch among the angels.
The company's announcement names Natural Capital, Amazon, GV, AMD Ventures, EQT and IQT among the investors in the round.
The funding so far
With $337m raised in total, the new round accounts for most of the capital Odyssey has taken in. Neither source gives the sizes of the earlier rounds, so this article does not report a funding history.
The valuation of $1.45bn is for this round as the company announced it. Odyssey did not publish revenue figures. What it has shown publicly is a set of models and a cloud and chip partnership with Amazon.
TechCrunch lists Jeff Dean, Elad Gil, Garry Tan, Guillermo Rauch and Kyle Vogt among the angel investors. Odyssey's own announcement also names researchers from OpenAI, DeepMind, MSL, Recursive and Thinking Machines among its backers. The company says the new funds will be used to accelerate its work on world models and did not itemise the spending.
Company website: odyssey.systems