By Wen Shao
Publication Date: 2026-10-06 00:42:00
World models are capturing the tech industry’s attention and investment dollars, amid growing expectations that AI will soon move beyond our screens and into the physical world of cars, robots, and other objects.
A slew of new startups are developing world models, which are typically based on video data rather than the text-based large language models like OpenAI’s GPT and Anthropic’s Claude. In just the last week, AMD announced plans to acquire World Labs for $8.2 billion in stock and video AI startup Runway unveiled the first open-weight version of its world model.
And just as generative AI helped bring about a broader industry to train and run LLMs, the rising popularity of world models is spurring new innovation and startups. On Monday, San Francisco-based Reactor said that it added Nvidia’s venture capital arm and Sapphire Ventures to its cap table, adding to a Series A round announced in May and bringing its total funding to $74 million.
Reactor, which emerged from stealth in May, develops software to make world models run faster and cheaper, and sells a cloud service that manages the computing capacity.
“Once the model exists, how do you actually run it?” co-founder and CEO Alberto Taiuti told Fortune, describing the question that led him and co-founder Bryce Schmidtchen to start Reactor. Both previously worked on Apple’s Vision Pro. Taiuti also co-founded the AI video generator startup Luma AI, where he served as chief technology…
