Odyssey: $310m Series B to Scale World Simulation

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US-based AI research lab Odyssey has raised $310m in a Series B round at a post-money valuation of $1.45B. The round was led by Natural Capital, with participation from Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN), GV (Google Ventures), AMD Ventures, EQT (STO: EQT), and In-Q-Tel. Existing angels maintained their positions, including Jeff Dean, Elad Gil, Qasar Younis, Garry Tan, Guillermo Rauch, and Kyle Vogt, alongside researchers from OpenAI, DeepMind, and several other AI-focused institutions. Concurrently, Amazon Web Services agreed to become Odyssey’s preferred cloud provider, with the company also partnering with Amazon’s Annapurna Labs to co-optimize world models on AWS Trainium chips.

Odyssey was founded in 2023 by Oliver Cameron (CEO) and Jeff Hawke (CTO). The broader team draws from DeepMind, Tesla, Waymo, Meta, Apple, and Wayve. Prior to the Series B, the company had raised a $9m Seed round in Jul’24, backed by GV, DCVC, and Air Street Capital, followed by an $18m Series A in Nov’24 led by EQT with GV and Air Street Capital returning. Total disclosed funding now stands at $337m across three rounds in under two years.

Odyssey develops general world models, which the company describes as causal, multimodal AI systems capable of predicting, simulating, and interacting with physical environments over extended time horizons. Its published research to date covers four core projects:

• Odyssey-2 Max, which advanced physics accuracy for general world simulation.
• Starchild-1, the company’s real-time multimodal world model.
• Agora-1, which introduced multi-agent interaction within a shared simulation environment.
• PROWL, which demonstrated how world models can improve through active exploration.

Target verticals span robotics, gaming, healthcare, education, science, and defense, the last underscored by the participation of In-Q-Tel, the strategic investment arm of the US intelligence community. 

Odyssey’s raise follows a similar pattern to Decart’s $300m Series B, which we covered in our previous digest, where we also published a breakdown of AI-gaming capital flows from 2020 to 2026. Together, they point to world simulation emerging as a distinct AI infrastructure category, attracting large-scale capital at an accelerating pace.

We will continue to monitor how Odyssey’s world model research translates into commercial deployments across gaming, robotics, and the broader physical AI stack.