We’ve already watched AI turn written prompts into eerily lifelike images, avatars, and even videos—thanks to models like OpenAI’s Sora and tools like Stable Diffusion. But let’s be honest: that was just the appetizer. The main course? Full-blown, AI-generated 3D worlds built from nothing but a few words.
And now, someone very qualified is stepping up to serve it.
Meet Matthias Niessner. You might know him as the co-founder of Synthesia (you know, the AI avatar company sitting pretty with a $2.1B valuation). But now he’s back with a bold new venture: SpAItial (yes, that pun is deliberate), a startup dedicated to generating photorealistic, interactive 3D environments straight from text prompts.
Niessner has taken a leave from his visual computing & AI lab at the Technical University of Munich and is diving headfirst into the 3D frontier. And investors are betting big—$13 million in seed funding kind of big. That’s a huge round for a European AI startup with only a teaser video and a vision. But the kicker? That teaser is convincing. Think: type “cozy sci-fi coffee shop with moonlight streaming in” and watch it materialize in 3D.
But it’s not just about visuals. SpAItial wants these worlds to act like the real thing—interactive, responsive, almost playable. That’s where the dream gets interesting. Imagine not just building a virtual apartment, but walking around in it, knocking over a lamp, or maybe even hosting a virtual dinner party (AI guests optional).
Backing him up is a technical dream team: Ricardo Martin-Brualla, ex-Google and 3D teleconferencing guru, and David Novotny, formerly of Meta’s text-to-3D division. These aren’t rookies—they’re industry veterans who’ve already built pieces of this future.
Yes, SpAItial will face competition. Odyssey is already eyeing the entertainment space with its $27M war chest. World Labs, led by none other than Fei-Fei Li, has hit unicorn status with a billion-dollar valuation. But as Niessner puts it, “No one has cracked the interactive part yet.”
In other words, the 3D race has officially started. And SpAItial isn’t here to play—it’s here to build worlds. Literally.
