Nvidia has backed startup Reactor as investor money and product launches keep building around world models, the new AI category focused on video data and physical systems.
On Monday, San Francisco-based Reactor said it added Nvidia's venture capital arm and Sapphire Ventures to its cap table. The new money builds on a Series A round announced in May and brings Reactor's total funding to $74 million.
Reactor emerged from stealth in May. The company develops software designed to make world models run faster and cheaper, and it also sells a cloud service that manages computing capacity.
Co-founder and CEO Alberto Taiuti said the question behind the company was, 'Once the model exists, how do you actually run it?' Taiuti and co-founder Bryce Schmidtchen 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 officer.
Reactor says Hollywood studios, advertising platforms and streaming services have active projects on its platform. The company, however, sees robots as a major area of focus.
Taiuti said building conventional simulations for robot testing can be time-consuming and costly because developers must create three-dimensional objects and configure scenes. He said world models could reduce some of that work by generating environments from prompts. Reactor says it can run world models that respond to robot actions, allowing developers to test their software in those generated environments.
Running the models in the cloud can also give developers access to more computing power without adding that hardware to each robot, Taiuti said. It can also let them upgrade the computers running the models without replacing hardware across a fleet.
Reactor plans to use the investment to secure more computing capacity, expand its team and buy robot hardware to test its systems, Taiuti said.
The deal lands as world models draw fresh attention across the tech industry. Fortune reported that AMD announced plans to acquire World Labs for $8.2 billion in stock, and Runway unveiled the first open-weight version of its world model in the same stretch.
Nvidia has its own Cosmos world models, along with Isaac tools for robot simulation and Jetson computers that run AI on robots. Its investment in Reactor gives it a stake in infrastructure for running interactive models.
The market has already voted on the direction of this investment wave: computing power, cloud scale and robot testing infrastructure are now the real bottlenecks. Capital is chasing the picks and shovels, not just the headlines.
