Messi's Play Time Invests in Fei-Fei Li's World Labs at $5 Billion Valuation

After the World Cup final, the 39-year-old Messi failed to win the championship. His investment platform Play Time invested in World Labs, a company founded by Fei-Fei Li that uses AI to generate three-dimensional worlds.

Fei-Fei Li previously led the team that built ImageNet, a dataset containing over 14 million images covering more than 20,000 categories, which advanced deep learning. In 2024, Fei-Fei Li co-founded World Labs with three experts, focusing on spatial intelligence technology. In the year of its founding, the company raised $230 million in funding, led by a16z, NEA, and Radical Ventures, with participation from investment arms of Nvidia, AMD, and Intel.

In 2026, Nvidia and AMD continued to follow on, and Autodesk invested $200 million. World Labs first demonstrated its technology at the end of 2024: users can upload images to generate explorable 3D scenes. In 2025, it launched the product Marble, which can generate 3D worlds based on images, text, video, and 3D layouts, and supports editing and expansion. Marble can be used in industries such as gaming, film and television, architectural design, and virtual reality, reducing production time. In July 2026, World Labs acquired the robotics simulation platform SceniX, supplementing its physical simulation and robot training capabilities.

There is competition in this field; Google DeepMind and Nvidia are also developing similar technologies. World Labs needs to compete with better-resourced giants for market share.