Stanford University’s artificial intelligence pioneer Fei-Fei Li has built a billion-dollar startup in just four months, joining the fast-paced race to commercialize AI technology.

Li, who is known as the "Godmother of AI," founded the company World Labs in April, according to three people familiar with the matter. The startup has already completed two rounds of financing and brought in investors like Andreessen Horowitz and Radical Ventures. These investors have valued the company at over a billion dollars.

In the latest funding round, World Labs raised around $100 million, according to one of the sources. Fei-Fei Li did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Andreessen Horowitz and Radical Ventures declined to comment.

World Labs is the latest AI startup to attract large investments following the release of OpenAI's ChatGPT chatbot in November 2022, which led to a surge in investor interest in generative AI. In the past three months alone, investors have invested more than $27 billion in U.S. AI startups, accounting for roughly half of all startup funding during this period, according to PitchBook.

Li founded World Labs while she was on partial leave from her position at Stanford University, where she co-founded the Human-Centered AI Institute, a research institute launched in 2019 that aims to use emerging technology to improve human conditions. Her company will attempt to develop "spatial intelligence" in AI by enabling human-like processing of visual data. In a TED talk in April in Vancouver, Li described the potential of machines to understand and navigate three-dimensional spaces.

This work would represent a significant breakthrough in AI by enabling interaction with real environments and the development of more advanced autonomous systems. Li became known in the AI scene by developing ImageNet, a large image dataset that advanced the ability of computer vision technology to identify objects. From 2017 to 2018, she led the AI division at Google Cloud, was a board member at Twitter from 2020 to 2022, and is a consultant for the White House AI working group.

Large image databases have been crucial for recent breakthroughs in AI, as they enable self-driving cars to navigate and AI models to correctly identify objects. Li's vision for spatial intelligence is even more ambitious: She wants to train a machine that understands the complex physical world and the relationships of objects within it.

[World Labs] is developing a model that understands the three-dimensional physical world; essentially the dimensions of objects, where things are located, and what they are doing," said a venture capitalist knowledgeable about Li's work.

The heading translates to:

"Among the other AI groups that are attracting investor interest are several that are developing intelligent robots capable of understanding and manipulating their physical environment. Skild, which is developing a 'universal brain for a variety of robots,' was valued at $1.5 billion last week following a $300 million funding round from SoftBank, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos's investment fund, and Lightspeed Venture Partners.