Who is World Labs? An independent profile of the company behind Atlas

World Labs is the company that makes Atlas and Marble. If you arrived here by searching “worldlab atlas”, “atlas world labs” or just “world labs”, this page is the plain-English profile: who founded the company, how it is funded, what it has shipped and in what order, and how the pieces fit together. It is written by an independent site that is not affiliated with World Labs — this is not the official World Labs website, and for the company’s own announcements you should go to worldlabs.ai first. Every fact here links to its source with a date.

What World Labs is

World Labs is an AI research and product company built around one idea, which its founders call spatial intelligence: the ability of a machine to perceive, generate and reason about the three-dimensional world, as distinct from the language-centred intelligence of chatbots. In practice that means building world models, neural networks that learn how scenes look from any viewpoint and how they change over time, and turning them into tools for creating and reconstructing 3D environments.

The company came out of stealth on September 13, 2024 with $230 million in funding and a valuation above $1 billion before it had shipped anything (TechCrunch). Two years later it has three public-facing things: Marble, a 3D world generator; the World API, which exposes Marble to developers; and Atlas, the omni world model announced on September 1, 2026 that this site is named after.

The name is written as two words. Searches for “worldlab”, “worldlabs” and “world lab” all mean the same company, whose domain is worldlabs.ai.

Founders

Four people founded World Labs in 2023 (TechCrunch).

• Fei-Fei Li, co-founder and CEO. A Stanford computer science professor and co-director of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI, best known for creating ImageNet, the dataset that triggered the deep learning boom in computer vision. She is the reason the company is often referred to as “Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs”.
• Justin Johnson, co-founder. A former University of Michigan professor and Meta research scientist whose work spans neural style transfer, 3D vision and generative models.
• Christoph Lassner, co-founder. Previously at Meta Reality Labs and Epic Games, working on differentiable rendering and neural 3D representations.
• Ben Mildenhall, co-founder. Formerly at Google Research and a co-author of the original NeRF paper, the 2020 work that started the neural radiance field line of research that Gaussian splatting later displaced. Why that matters for the company’s output formats is explained in Gaussian splatting vs NeRF.

The combination is a computer vision leader plus three researchers who spent the previous decade on how to represent 3D scenes for neural networks. That background shows in the products: everything World Labs ships outputs geometry, not just pixels.

Funding

World Labs has disclosed roughly $1.23 billion in funding as of September 2026 (Dealroom).

Date	Amount	Notes
September 13, 2024	$230M across two rounds	Led by Andreessen Horowitz, NEA and Radical Ventures; angels include Marc Benioff, Jeff Dean, Geoffrey Hinton, Reid Hoffman and Eric Schmidt
February 18, 2026	$1B	Participants include Autodesk, AMD, NVIDIA and Fidelity

Sources: TechCrunch, U.S. News / Reuters, Dealroom.

The investor list is worth reading as a strategy statement. Autodesk makes the design tools 3D worlds end up in. AMD and NVIDIA make the GPUs that train and render them. A billion dollars is also enough to keep a model like Atlas in a long private beta without pressure to monetise early, which is relevant to anyone waiting for Atlas access.

Products and timeline

World Labs has shipped in a clear sequence: a consumer-facing generator first, an API for it second, an open-source renderer alongside, and then a larger model.

Date	Release	What it is
November 12, 2025	Marble	First commercial product: generates navigable 3D worlds from text, images, panoramas and video, with an editor and exports
January 21, 2026	World API	REST API exposing Marble to developers; credit-based pricing
April 2, 2026	Marble 1.1 and 1.1 Plus	Improved default model and an auto-expanding variant
September 1, 2026	Atlas	Omni world model: camera-controlled video up to 1440p, few-view 3D reconstruction, real-to-sim; early access only

Sources: TechCrunch, World Labs, Radiance Fields, World Labs.

Marble

Marble is the product you can use today. It takes a prompt, a photo, several photos, a 360° panorama or a video and produces a Gaussian-splat world you can walk through in the browser, edit, and export as splats, a mesh or a fly-through video (World Labs). It launched on November 12, 2025 as the company’s first commercial product (TechCrunch) and was updated to Marble 1.1 on April 2, 2026.

World API

The World API opened on January 21, 2026 and is how developers call Marble (World Labs). Credits cost $1 per 1,250, a Marble 1.1 world costs 1,500 credits, about $1.20, and PLY export is free (World Labs docs). The endpoint shapes, export options and gotchas are covered in the Marble World API guide, and current prices on the pricing page. It is the only public API from a world-model company that returns 3D geometry rather than video, a point we expand in world model APIs compared.

Spark

Spark is World Labs’ open-source Gaussian splat renderer for three.js, released under the MIT licence on GitHub (Spark). It loads .ply, .spz, .splat, .ksplat and .sog files and is the renderer behind the free splat viewer on this site. Publishing the renderer is how World Labs makes its output format viewable anywhere, which matters more as Atlas produces splats too.

Atlas

Atlas is the model this site follows. Announced on September 1, 2026, World Labs describes it as an omni world model: a single multimodal autoregressive diffusion transformer that generates camera-controlled video up to 1440p and one minute long, reconstructs 3D scenes as point clouds and Gaussian splats from as few as two or three photos, and serves as a simulator for robotics (SiliconANGLE). It is available only to early-access partners, with no paper, price or public API as of September 7, 2026. The full explainer is What is the Atlas world model; the head-to-head with Marble is Atlas vs Marble.

How Atlas and Marble fit together

People searching “world labs atlas” often assume Atlas replaces Marble. It does not, at least not yet. World Labs positions Marble as the product for everyone and Atlas as the research frontier that “builds on the Marble model” (Dealroom). The practical reading:

• Marble is what you build on this quarter. It has an API, published pricing and exportable outputs.
• Atlas is what you plan for. It produces the same output family, Gaussian splats, from fewer inputs, adds video with an explicit camera path, and is expected to arrive on the same developer platform when it opens.
• Spark is the shared layer. Whatever either model generates, you can render it in the browser with the same code.

That is why this site’s tools run on Marble today and are designed to route to Atlas later, and why the Atlas World Model API page tracks the World API as the most likely home for an Atlas endpoint.

World Labs and the rest of the field

World Labs is one of several companies shipping things called world models, and they are not all trying to do the same job. Google DeepMind’s Genie 3 and Odyssey’s Odyssey-2 render playable environments in real time. Runway’s GWM Worlds 2 does the same with audio. OpenAI’s Sora 2 and MiniMax’s H3 generate cinematic video clips. World Labs is the one whose models output explicit 3D geometry you can export and reuse, and the only one so far to combine that with camera-controlled video in a single model. The side-by-side tables are in the comparison hub, starting with Atlas vs Genie 3 and Atlas vs GWM Worlds 2.

What World Labs has not disclosed

For completeness, here is what you will not find on worldlabs.ai as of September 7, 2026, so you can treat any claims elsewhere with caution:

• A technical paper for Atlas or Marble, including parameter counts and training data.
• Atlas pricing, a general-availability date, or the names of early-access partners.
• Independent benchmark results. The 75% to 94% human-preference figures for Atlas are World Labs’ own (The Decoder); we unpack them in Atlas benchmarks explained.
• Revenue, customer counts or the valuation of the February 2026 round.

How to follow World Labs

The company announces on its blog at worldlabs.ai and on X. This site records every material change, upstream or here, in the changelog within 48 hours, and its RSS feed carries the same entries, including when Atlas access widens or its API opens. If you want to start building on World Labs technology today, the Marble World API guide and the TypeScript quickstart are the place to begin.