In the first half of 2026, venture investors committed more than $3 billion to startups building world models, AI systems that learn the physics of an environment instead of the statistics of text. Yann LeCun walked out of Meta and raised a $1.03 billion seed at a $3.5 billion valuation, the largest seed round in European history. World Labs, founded by Stanford’s Fei-Fei Li, raised $1 billion in February 2026 at a $5.4 billion post-money valuation, lifting its total to $1.23 billion. Decart closed $300 million in May at a $4 billion valuation. Odyssey raised a $310 million Series B in June at $1.45 billion. General Intuition, eight months after a $133.7 million seed, is in talks to raise roughly $300 million at just over $2 billion. The field has not agreed on what a world model is; Fei-Fei Li forced the question in June with a functional taxonomy splitting systems into renderers, simulators, and planners, placing most current demos as renderers. Three races run underneath: long-horizon consistency, representation, and the data moat. OpenAI reportedly offered $500 million for Medal's gameplay archive before General Intuition spun out of it.