World model startup Odyssey raises $310M Series B at $1.45B valuation with backing from Amazon, AMD, and GV

Odyssey, a startup focused on world models—AI systems that gather and simulate physical-world data—announced a $310 million Series B funding round at a $1.45 billion valuation. The round was led by Natural Capital, with participation from Amazon, AMD Ventures, GV, and other investors. The company was founded in 2023 by Oliver Cameron, former CEO and co-founder of autonomous vehicle company Voyage (acquired by GM’s Cruise), and CTO Jeff Hawke, a former engineer at self-driving startup Wayve.

Odyssey’s technology is designed to simulate real-world environments with accurate physics, enabling applications such as generating rich, interactive video from text prompts and supporting use cases in video-game creation and robotics. The company has previously collected real-world data using camera-equipped teams, a method it compares to Google Earth’s approach of using camera-equipped vehicles for mapping.

With Amazon’s participation in the round, Odyssey named AWS as its preferred cloud provider and stated it will optimize its world models to run on AWS Trainium chips, positioning the startup to leverage AWS’s custom AI hardware. The company has raised a total of $337 million to date.

The funding round also included angel investors such as Jeff Dean, Google’s chief scientist and a longtime AI leader; Elad Gil, a prominent AI investor and entrepreneur; Garry Tan, CEO of Y Combinator; Guillermo Rauch, CEO of Vercel; and Kyle Vogt, founder of Cruise. The participation of these high-profile individuals underscores the strategic and technical interest in world models as a next-generation AI paradigm.