Sanja Fidler, the former head of Nvidiaâs Toronto AI lab, has launched a new startup to tackle how robots interact with the physical world through AI.
The news: Fidler announced today that sheâs launching physical AI startup Veeda AI alongside longtime Nvidia colleagues Zan Gojcic, who will serve as CTO, and Huan Ling, who will be chief scientist. The startup will focus on world models, which are AI models that create an internal simulation of the real world based on things like physical, spatial, and movement data.
Veeda AI, which was officially incorporated in June under the name Veeda Innovation, is backed by Torontoâs Radical Ventures and Silicon Valley firm Khosla Ventures. The company confirmed that it has raised $90 million USD ($124 million CAD) from investors so far, as first reported by The Logic.Â
From the source: âAt Veeda, our sole mission is to build simulated reality for Physical AI. Our conviction is that this will become the critical infrastructure layer for all areas of robotics,â Fidler wrote in a LinkedIn post.
The context: Fidler was Nvidiaâs first hire at its Canadian research lab, now the Spatial Intelligence Lab, and helmed it for eight years. The lab focused on research projects into world modelling simulations of physical systems, as well as algorithms for understanding three-dimensional data.
The University of Toronto associate professor announced her departure from the AI chip giant earlier this month, writing online that world models are âwhere the next breakthrough lies.â
Final thought: While the worldâs leading AI developers have so far built their reputations on text-based large language models, Veeda joins a crop of neolabs building world models that deal with three-dimensional physical data. Former Meta chief scientist Yann LeCun left the big tech company to start Advanced Machine Intelligence Labs last year; startup General Intuition hit a $2.3-billion USD valuation for its world models based on video gaming data.
Feature image courtesy Sanja Fidler via LinkedIn.