General Intuition in talks to raise $300M at around $2B valuation
Quick Answer
General Intuition is negotiating to secure $300 million in funding, aiming for a valuation of approximately $2 billion.
Quick Take
The startup specializes in training AI agents focused on spatial-temporal reasoning, attracting interest from notable investors like Jeff Bezos.
Key Points
- General Intuition aims to raise $300 million in its funding round.
- The company is valued at around $2 billion.
- Investors include high-profile backers like Jeff Bezos.
- Focuses on training AI agents for spatial-temporal reasoning.
📖 Reader Mode
~2 min readGeneral Intuition, the New York-based startup building a foundation model that trains AI agents how to move through space and time, is in talks to raise around $300 million, sources familiar with the matter told TechCrunch.
The raise comes eight months after General Intuition spun out of Medal, a platform for uploading and sharing video game clips, with a $134 million seed round. The fresh funds would bring the startup’s valuation up to just over $2 billion, sources say.
Sources tell TechCrunch General Intuition has secured funds from backers, including Jeff Bezos and Eric Schmidt, as well as existing investors Khosla Ventures and General Catalyst.
Pim de Witte, who co-founded Medal, founded and leads General Intuition alongside co-founders Eloi Alonso, Adam Jelley, and Vincent Micheli — researchers who bring expertise in world modeling and simulation.
The startup trains embodied AI and world models using Medal’s dataset of 2 billion videos per year from 10 million monthly active users. The startup’s pitch is that such a dataset — unique because it allows AI to learn from interactive, first-person gameplay — is the perfect base to teach machines deep spatial-temporal reasoning, allowing them to perceive, anticipate, and interact in real time in simulation.
That dataset has reportedly attracted the attention of OpenAI, which previously attempted to acquire Medal. And sources say OpenAI hasn’t been the only big AI lab to come knocking.
The world model space that General Intuition is playing in is heating up. Startups like Runway, Decart, and World Labs have all recently released world models, and Google’s Genie 3 recently began integrating Google Maps data for more real-world simulation capabilities.
All of these companies see gaming and robotics training as near-term commercial use cases, but General Intuition takes a different approach: It builds world models to train agents, not to sell them. The agents are the product, and the startup’s unique dataset gives it a path to viability.
General Intuition will use the funds to scale up its compute capacity so it can release a new product by the end of summer or early fall, according to a source familiar with the matter.
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Rebecca Bellan is a senior reporter at TechCrunch where she covers the business, policy, and emerging trends shaping artificial intelligence. Her work has also appeared in Forbes, Bloomberg, The Atlantic, The Daily Beast, and other publications.
You can contact or verify outreach from Rebecca by emailing rebecca.bellan@techcrunch.com or via encrypted message at rebeccabellan.491 on Signal.
— Originally published at techcrunch.com
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