June 17 (Reuters) - AI lab Odyssey on Wednesday said it has raised $310 million in a Series B round valuing it at $1.45 billion, and struck a deal with Amazon Web Services that gives it access to specialized chips designed for high-performance machine-learning workloads.

The round, led by Natural Capital, saw participation from Amazon, AMD Ventures, Google Ventures, EQT and In-Q-Tel, alongside prominent individual investors including Google's chief scientist Jeff Dean and Garry Tan, president and CEO of Y Combinator.

The raise underscores growing investor appetite for advanced simulation technologies, as AI companies push beyond chatbots toward systems that can carry out complex tasks with minimal human intervention. Odyssey is building models that can simulate the real world and act without human input. 

"The last few years have seen major breakthroughs in scaling, interactivity, multimodality and physics accuracy, and the field is now advancing extremely quickly," said Oliver Cameron, co-founder and CEO of Odyssey.

"This round provides the compute, infrastructure and partners to push the frontier of general world models, and to achieve a GPT-3 moment for the field," he added, referring to the inflection point where an AI model could scale up to demonstrate unprecedented abilities. 

AWS PARTNERSHIP

Odyssey also said it has struck a deal with Amazon Web Services to make AWS its preferred cloud provider, giving the startup access to specialized chips such as Trainium that are designed for training and running high-performance AI systems.

The partnership will include joint research and efforts to bring its models to market, particularly in compute-intensive applications, the startup said. 

Odyssey has released a series of research systems over the last three years, including Odyssey-2 Max, Starchild-1 and Agora-1, which focus on improving physics accuracy, real-time multimodal interaction and multi-agent coordination in simulated environments.