Odyssey raises $310 million to accelerate its world models

Odyssey raises $310M in a Series B round led by Natural Capital to accelerate its world models for robotics, science, and defense.

Odyssey closes a $310 million Series B round, at a valuation of $1.45 billion, led by Natural Capital alongside Amazon, GV, AMD Ventures, EQT, and IQT. Founded three years ago by Oliver Cameron and Jeff Hawke, two autonomous vehicle veterans, the company is dedicating these funds to world models—systems designed to understand and simulate the physical world, its physics, causality, dynamics, and human behaviors.

The idea stems directly from autonomous driving, where the goal was already to predict the next state of the world in order to act. Odyssey sees in this a new category of foundation models, which it positions beyond language models, with target applications in robotics, science, healthcare, education, video games, and defense. The company claims a lineage of research models, including a real-time multimodal model and a multi-agent shared simulation.

This round also strengthens ties with Amazon, which becomes its preferred cloud provider: Odyssey is collaborating with Annapurna Labs to optimize its models on AWS Trainium chips. Cameron believes the field is approaching its GPT-3 moment—the shift from a research track to a foundational technology.