San Francisco-based Autodesk has invested $200 million in artificial intelligence startup World Labs, marking the largest startup investment in the company’s history and underscoring its growing commitment to physical-world AI.
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The funding, announced in a Feb. 18 blog post by Autodesk CEO Andrew Anagnost, brings World Labs’ total capital raised to $1 billion. According to Autodesk, the deal reflects a long-term strategy to embed more advanced AI capabilities into how buildings and infrastructure are designed, constructed and operated.
World Labs, also based in San Francisco, develops AI tools capable of generating 3D environments and objects from images, video or text. Its platform, Marble, focuses on what the industry increasingly refers to as “physical AI” — systems that reason in three dimensions and interact with the real world rather than purely digital environments.
In his blog post, Anagnost emphasized that Autodesk’s approach differs from broader AI investment trends focused on hyperscalers and large language models.
“Our investment in World Labs represents a different path, focused on solving the hardest problems in designing, building, and operating the physical world, guided by human needs and domain expertise rather than scale alone,” Anagnost wrote.
The investment positions Autodesk not only as a financial backer but also as a strategic advisor to World Labs, enabling closer collaboration on research, product integration and long-term AI infrastructure development.
Autodesk executives say physical AI could transform multiple phases of construction and asset management.
“As AI becomes capable of reasoning in 3D, it will power more intelligent automation across the built environment—from design and prefabrication to progress tracking during construction, to inspection, reality capture, and digital twins,” said Lalith Subramanian, Autodesk’s global vice president of product and engineering.
By embedding AI that understands spatial relationships, geometry and real-world constraints, Autodesk aims to enhance design validation, automate repetitive modeling tasks and improve predictive project analytics.
The company’s move aligns with a broader industry push toward robotics and AI-powered automation. Startups focused on real-world AI applications have drawn significant investor interest. For example, FieldAI raised $405 million across two funding rounds to advance physical AI systems for robotics. Meanwhile, NVIDIA — through its venture arm NVentures — has supported both FieldAI and Bedrock Robotics, which recently secured $270 million in Series B funding to retrofit heavy machinery with autonomous technology.
Other investors in World Labs include AMD, Emerson Collective, Fidelity Management & Research and Sea, reflecting cross-industry confidence in the commercial potential of spatial and physical AI.
The investment comes shortly after Autodesk announced workforce reductions. On Jan. 22, the company said it would lay off approximately 7% of its global workforce, or about 1,000 employees, with the largest impact in customer-facing sales teams.
Despite the restructuring, Autodesk appears to be doubling down on long-term technology bets. By strengthening its AI capabilities — particularly those tied to spatial reasoning and automation — the firm is positioning itself to support increasingly digitized and robotics-enabled construction environments.
As robotics, digital twins and automated prefabrication continue to gain traction, Autodesk’s stake in World Labs signals a strategic commitment to shaping how AI integrates directly into physical-world workflows rather than remaining confined to data analysis or generative text applications.
The company says it will work closely with World Labs to exchange technical insights and deepen its AI foundation, with the goal of accelerating innovation across architecture, engineering and construction sectors.
Originally reported by Matthew Thibault, Reporter in Construction Dive.
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