Odyssey, a startup building AI "world models" that simulate the physical environment, has closed a $310 million Series B that pushes its valuation to $1.45 billion. The round was led by Natural Capital, with Amazon, AMD Ventures, and GV among the participating investors. Founded in 2023 by CEO Oliver Cameron and CTO Jeff Hawke—both veterans of the autonomous vehicle sector—the Los Angeles-based company has now raised $337 million in total funding.
Cameron previously co-founded self-driving startup Voyage, which GM's Cruise acquired, where he later served as VP of product. Hawke, meanwhile, was an engineer at UK-based autonomous driving company Wayve. That pedigree shaped Odyssey's unusual data-gathering approach: rather than sending camera-equipped cars around cities the way Google does for Street View, the company dispatched field workers wearing backpack-mounted cameras to capture real-world environments. The bet is that world models—AI systems that ingest physical-world data and simulate it with accurate physics—will be the next frontier beyond today's text-focused large language models.
Odyssey already offers several world models aimed at use cases including video-game creation and robotics, and has drawn attention for generating rich, interactive video from text prompts. The new capital and Amazon's strategic backing come with a concrete technical commitment: Odyssey will optimize its models to run on AWS's Trainium chips, positioning them as an alternative to Nvidia's dominant AI accelerators, and AWS becomes its preferred cloud provider.
The company also assembled a notable roster of angel investors, including Google chief scientist Jeff Dean, Elad Gil, Garry Tan, Vercel founder Guillermo Rauch, and Kyle Vogt, the founder of Cruise. With the round pushing Odyssey into unicorn territory, the company is now betting that a generation of investors—and major compute partners—are ready to fund the shift from chatbots to physics-aware world simulators.