General Intuition raises $320M to train AI agents on gameplay data

On Thursday, New York-based AI startup General Intuition, which operates in the US, announced it has raised $320 million in a funding round, valuing the company at $2.3 billion. The round brings the startup’s total disclosed funding to $454 million.

The funding breakdown and details include:

• Latest round: $320 million raised at a $2.3 billion valuation.
• Previous round: $134 million raised last October.
• Total disclosed funding: $454 million.
• Lead investor: Khosla Ventures.
• Other participants: General Catalyst, Jeff Bezos, Eric Schmidt, Nico Rosberg, and researchers from Google DeepMind and MIT.

The startup, spun out of Medal—a platform for sharing video game clips—uses hundreds of millions of hours of gameplay data to train its “agentic models,” which are AI models capable of taking actions in environments. General Intuition aims to use this data to help AI generalize from simulation to physical robotics. The training occurs in what the company calls its “world model,” which is a simulated environment generated frame-by-frame rather than rendered by a traditional game engine. To demonstrate the model’s adaptability, the company showed a robot navigating an office after using only eight minutes of real-world robotics data to fine-tune the model. Chief product officer Kent Rollins noted that their agent had been playing for 100 hours straight. “The same brain powering the agent playing the game is powering the robot,” said Pim de Witte, co-founder and CEO of General Intuition.

The company plans to focus on pre-training the next version of its model, utilizing compute capacity from its partner CoreWeave. It also plans to make its API more broadly available by the end of summer. Lead investor Vinod Khosla of Khosla Ventures backed the startup’s data position, noting that the human action and reaction data found in games is key to the emergence of intuition in AI. Khosla dismissed the idea of an early exit, stating that at this stage, an acquisition would merely be an uninteresting data acquisition.

The company’s leadership, which includes Dutch CEO Pim de Witte, chief of staff Brianna Martin, and European co-founders Eloi Alonso, Adam Jelley, and Vincent Micheli, maintains an identity separate from Silicon Valley firms. De Witte, who earned $1.5 million building a private RuneScape server, has established ethical boundaries for the technology. Specifically, de Witte stated that no agents will be employed to harm humans, explicitly ruling out military applications or lethal autonomy. To address potential AI-driven displacement, General Intuition launched Nerve, a jobs marketplace platform designed to let gamers earn money through data labeling and robot teleoperation.

Why it matters

General Intuition is betting that datasets of human gameplay can solve the ‘simulation-to-real-world’ gap in robotics, a strategy that has attracted capital and backers.