World Labs, a spatial intelligence company co-founded by AI pioneer Fei-Fei Li in 2024, acquired SceniX on July 21 to bring high-fidelity simulation technology in-house for robot training. The deal integrates SceniX’s expertise into World Labs’ Marble platform, which generates photorealistic, dynamic 3D environments from text and image inputs. This enables “real-to-sim-to-real” training, where real-world environments are digitized, robots train inside digital twins, and learned behaviors are deployed physically, sidestepping costly real-world data collection. World Labs raised $230 million in funding during 2024, pushing its valuation past $1 billion, and in February 2026, Autodesk made a $200 million strategic investment, bringing total known funding to at least $430 million. Fei-Fei Li, former director of Stanford’s AI Lab and a researcher behind ImageNet, adds credibility. The robotics training bottleneck affects industry players like Amazon and humanoid robot startups, with competitors including NVIDIA’s Omniverse platform and Google DeepMind.