One of Europe’s top AI researchers raised a $13M seed to crack the ‘holy grail’ of models

From OpenAI’s 4o to Stable Diffusion, AI foundation models that create realistic images from a text prompt are now plentiful. In contrast, foundation models capable of generating full, coherent 3D online environments from a text prompt are only just emerging. Still, it’s only a question of when, not if, these models will become readily available. Now one of Europe’s most prominent AI 3D model researchers, Matthias Niessner, has taken an entrepreneurial leave of absence from his visual computing & AI lab at the Technical University of Munich to found a startup working in the area: SpAItial. Formerly a cofounder at Synthesia, the realistic AI avatar startup valued at $2.1 billion, Niessner has raised an unusually large seed round for a European startup of $13 million. The round was led by Earlybird Venture Capital, a prominent European early-stage investor (backers of UiPath, PeakGames for instance) with participation from Speedinvest and several high-profile angels. That round size i ... Read full article.