She's got the whole World in her Labs

Top News

• World Labs drops Marble: The AI model company comes from computer scientist Fei-Fei Li, a Stanford professor and noted early AI and computer vision pioneer. They’ve just released Marble, which can create and simulate expansive, completely three-dimensional environments from still images, videos, or even simple text prompts. According to Li, these world models will be essential as we attempt to unlock “spatial intelligence” — the ability for an AI system to understand the various ways objects move through physical space. World models are clearly a hot new niche; just YESTERDAY, we reported that Meta’s chief AI scientist Yann LeCun was departing to launch his own world model concern.

• Teradar wants to improve on lidar: Lidar (or “light detection and ranging”) systems are the underlying technology that allows autonomous vehicles like Waymos to navigate the road, and they’re typically considered the state of the art in terms of keeping self-driving vehicles from colliding with objects or, worse yet, pedestrians. (At least until Tesla FSD’s AI + Cameras combo catches up.) Still, Boston-based startup Teradar is exploring an exciting alternative. They’ve designed a solid-state sensor that uses the terahertz band — somewhere between a microwave and an infrared beam — to navigate the world, and co-founder/CEO Matt Carey claims it’s a superior option to lidar or radar sensors, able to scan its surroundings clearly, even through rain and fog. The company has raised a $150 million Series B round to continue perfecting the technology. Backers include the venture arm of Lockheed Martin and defense-focused fund VXI Capital. So there are clearly some potential applications here that go beyond safer robotaxi rides.

• WisdomAI thinks up $50m: The startup announced a $23 million seed round, led by Coatue, six months ago, and now they’re back with a $50 million Series A led by Kleiner Perkins (with participation from Nvidia’s VC arm, NVentures). Wisdom does “AI-driven data analytics” for people tired to staring at charts and reports and wondering “what does it all mean?!” Essentially, you feed your company’s data into their model — even so-called “dirty data,” that hasn’t been proofed for typos and mistakes — and then it answers your most pressing queries in natural language. As an added bit of differentiation from all the other AI analytics players in the space, Wisdom also has a unique LLM workaround. They use the big models to write data queries, but then turn to their own proprietary software to actually retrieve said data from storage. So even if the LLM hallucinates, you’ll just get a nonsensical query, not inaccurate information. How very… wise.

TWiST 500

Big news today from three, count ‘em THREE, leading TWiST 500 concerns. Let’s waste no further time.

Anthropic: The Claude makers announced a new $50 billion infrastructure project, including shiny new custom data centers in New York and right here in the Lone Star State, developed in partnership with the AI cloud platform Fluidstack. The first locations are expected to go live as early as next year. Context-wise, this is of course part of an massive effort by a number of US AI concerns to quickly build out the nation’s compute capacity. Where will Anthropic and Fluidstack find the juice to power all of these new datacenters, even as their competitors reportedly have racks of GPUs sitting idle with nowhere to plug them in? An intriguing question…

OpenAI: Arguably the T500’s most prominent and closely-followed member of the moment, the House that Altman Built released GPT-5.1 today, an update to its flagship model. Two modes are available: GPT-5.1 Instant for quick queries and GPT-5.1 Thinking for more complex deep dives. Users don’t choose between them; OpenAI routes your prompt automatically to the most appropriate destination. The official blog post suggests that this is an attempt to restore some of the personality that was lost in the transition from GPT-4o to GPT-5. OpenAI claims that the latest model is “warmer” than its predecessor, while also being smarter and better equipped to answer complex questions. Plus there are pre-set personas from which you can select, including Professional, Friendly, Candid, Quirky, Efficient, Nerdy, and Cynical. Will this make ChatGPT more fun to talk to, without making users lose touch with reality, or fall in love? Time will tell.

Groww: Sadly, it’s time for us to say goodbye to the Indian online brokerage, as it’s just this week listed an IPO. The company raised around ₹66.3 billion, which works out to $748 million, a 29% jump over the issue price. The fintech firm, from former Flipkart staffers, now ranks among India’s largest online investment platforms, with more than 14 million active users as of June 2025. The platform offers trading in equities, mutual funds, and some securities, and also has an active lending business. It’s been a pretty hot year for Indian startups, with Lenskart, Pine Labs, Physics Wallah, and Capillary Technologies all set for imminent IPOs. We’ll have to start keeping a closer eye on this space and add a few new players to take Groww’s now-emptied spot.

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This Week in Startups

E2207: We’ve got a pair of fresh TWiST 500 interviews for you today. First up, Alex chats with Harvey AI president Gabe Pereyra about why legal work is so perfectly suited to LLMs, and how to charge for legal services when you can get things done in billable minutes, not hours. Then we’ve got OpenRouter CEO Alex Atallah helping us compare and contrast the major LLMs, and noting why evals and benchmarks have become so central to the entire AI industry. Finally, Jason stops by to answer some more Founder Questions from around the Web.

E2206: Jason’s in Japan this week launching Founder University, Tokyo, but thankfully he stayed up into the wee hours to record this special edition of TWiST. THREE TWiST 500 companies are circling IPOs: Ledger, 1Password, and Mercury. So you know Alex and JCal had thoughts. Plus, why is Marc Andreessen feuding with The Pope on X? Should we trust these viral allegations against AI startup Giga? Friends of the pod Gamma are growing FAST! Plus lots more news and updates.

E2205: On a special edition of TWiST, Alex chats with three of our favorite TWiST 500 startup founders. First, Billy Thalheimer introduces us to REGENT’s part-aircraft/part-boat autonomous Seaglider vehicle, which they’re building for both consumer and defense purposes. Then Ayan Parekh of Convexia tells us how they turn other labs IP leftovers into new drugs and treatments. Finally, we’ve got Hunter Leath of Archil discussing their unique approach to cloud data architecture.

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