Odyssey Closes $310M Series B at $1.45B Valuation With Amazon AWS Partnership
World-model startup Odyssey closed a $310 million Series B at a $1.45 billion valuation on June 17, led by Natural Capital with backing from Amazon, AMD Ventures, GV, EQT, and In-Q-Tel. Founded by former self-driving vehicle pioneers Oliver Cameron and Jeff Hawke, Odyssey develops multimodal AI systems that simulate real-world environments with accurate physics, targeting applications in robotics, gaming, science, and defense.
In a strategic move that signals shifting chip partnerships in AI infrastructure, Amazon Web Services will become Odyssey's preferred cloud provider. The startup will optimize its world models for AWS Trainium chips, Amazon's custom AI accelerators designed for high-throughput, low-latency training workloads. This marks a notable choice: Odyssey's Series A investor included Nvidia's venture arm just four months earlier, but the new partnership positions Trainium as an alternative to Nvidia's dominance.
The $310M raise gives Odyssey total funding of $337 million. Angel investors include Google's chief scientist Jeff Dean, Y Combinator president Garry Tan, Vercel founder Guillermo Rauch, and Cruise founder Kyle Vogt. For infrastructure architects evaluating AI training platforms, this bet on Amazon custom silicon over Nvidia marks a pivot point: as Trainium's revenue crossed $20 billion annually in Q1 2026 at triple-digit growth, the economics of vendor diversity in GPU/accelerator procurement are shifting.
Sources
- Primary source
- World model maker Odyssey nabs $1.45B valuation backed by Amazon
“World models are the next big thing in AI beyond text- and chat-based large language models”
- Odyssey Series B announcement
“AWS becomes preferred cloud provider; Odyssey collaborating with Amazon Annapurna Labs to optimize on AWS Trainium chips”
- After taking Nvidia's money, Odyssey bets on Amazon instead
“Odyssey is now one of the most capital-intensive AI bets per head in the market”