One Of Europe’s Top AI Researchers Raised $13M To Crack The ‘Holy Grail’ Of Models

From OpenAI’s 4o to Stable Diffusion, AI foundation models that create realistic images from a text prompt are now plentiful. In contrast, foundation models capable of generating full, coherent 3D online environments from a text prompt are only just emerging.Still, it’s only a question of when, not if, these models will become readily available.Now one of Europe’s most prominent AI 3D model researchers, Matthias Niessner, has taken an entrepreneurial leave of absence from his visual computing & AI lab at the Technical University of Munich to found a startup working in the area: SpAItial.Formerly a cofounder at Synthesia, the realistic AI avatar startup valued at $2.1 billion, Niessner has raised an unusually large seed round for a European startup of $13 million. The round was led by Earlybird Venture Capital, a prominent European early-stage investor (backers of UiPath, PeakGames for instance) with participation from Speedinvest and several high-profile angels.That round size is even more impressive when taking into account that SpAItial doesn’t have much to show the world yet other than a recently released teaser video showing how a text prompt could generate a 3D room. But then, there’s the technical team that Niessner assembled: Ricardo Martin-Brualla, who previously worked on Google’s 3D teleconferencing platform, now called Beam; and David Novotny, who spent six years at Meta where he led the company’s text-to-3D asset generation project.Their collective expertise will give them a fighting chance in a space that already includes some competitors with a similar focus on photorealism. There’s Odyssey, which raised $27 million and is going after entertainment use cases. But there’s also World Labs, the startup founded by AI pioneer Fei-Fei Li, and already valued at over $1 billion.Niessner thinks this is still little competition compared to what exists for other types of foundation models, but also in regard to ‘the bigger vision’ he and others are pursuing. I don’t just want to have a 3D world. I also want this world to behave like the real world. I want it to be interactable and [let you] do stuff in it, and nobody has really cracked that yet, he said.More on SpAItial fundraising and 3D models on TechCrunchAgentic AI for the Enterprise | Inbound and Outbound AI Voice AgentsI’ve partnered with DBC Technologies and I am now consulting with companies who are interested in automating inbound and outbound messaging with AI Voice Agents.If you are interested in AI Voice Agents for your business or organization click hereI interviewed DBC Technologies Founder and CEO, Dennis Wilson for an episode of the (A)bsolutely (I)ncredible Podcast, watch now to learn more about AI Voice Agents.Watch the interview with DBC Technologies’ Founder, Dennis Wilson on YouTubeWeb AI Chatbots, Inbound / Outbound AI Voice Agents, AI Marketing & ConsultingIf you are interested in AI Voice Agents for your business or organization, click hereThats all for today, but AI is moving fast - subscribe and follow for more Neural News. Get full access to Neural News Network at remunerationlabs.substack.com/subscribe