World Labs, a startup from artificial intelligence pioneer Fei-Fei Li, raised $1 billion in a new round of funding to pursue a novel approach to AI development.

Autodesk Inc. invested $200 million in World Labs as part of the round. Other backers include Andreessen Horowitz, Nvidia Corp. and Advanced Micro Devices Inc., World Labs said in a blog post Wednesday.

World Labs is one of a growing number of AI developers focusing on so-called world models, which are meant to navigate and make decisions about the three-dimensional world. Yann LeCun’s world models startup, AMI Labs, has also attracted significant interest from investors.

Late last year, World Labs launched its first product, Marble, which it describes as a model that can create 3D worlds from image or text prompts. With the new funding, the startup is focused on improving applications for robotics and scientific discovery, among other categories.

Li’s earlier work paved the way for many of the current innovations in AI. She was part of the team behind the academic project ImageNet, a database of millions of images that helped lead to advances in the ways computers recognize objects in images.

The startup did not disclose a valuation. Bloomberg News previously reported the firm was in funding discussions at a valuation of about $5 billion.