AI lab Odyssey valued at $1.45 billion in latest funding round

(Reuters) - AI lab Odyssey on Wednesday said it has raised $310 million in a Series B round valuing it at $1.45 billion, and struck a deal with Amazon Web Services that gives it access to specialized chips designed for high performance machine-learning workloads.

The round, led by Natural Capital, saw participation from Amazon, AMD Ventures, Google Ventures, EQT and In-Q-Tel, alongside prominent individual investors including Google’s chief scientist Jeff Dean and Garry Tan, president and CEO of Y Combinator.

The raise underscores growing investor ⁠appetite for advanced simulation technologies, as AI companies push beyond chatbots toward systems that can carry out complex tasks with minimal human intervention. Odyssey is building models that can simulate the real world and act without human input.

“The last few years have seen major breakthroughs in scaling, interactivity, multimodality and physics accuracy, and the field is now advancing extremely quickly,” said Oliver Cameron, co-founder and CEO of Odyssey.