robotics-simulation
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World Labs wants you to walk inside the picture
A photograph is a view. World Labs is turning it into a place - and its pending $8.2 billion AMD deal puts the machinery behind that ambition in the spotlight.
Apurva Shah Builds Worlds Where Robots Can Fail First
After two decades making digital worlds believable, the former Pixar technical leader is using simulation to make machines more dependable in the real one.
Steve Xie
Steve Xie is the founder and CEO of Lightwheel, a physical AI infrastructure company building simulation and synthetic data systems that teach robots to learn and operate in the real world. A physicist by training with a Columbia PhD, he led autonomous driving simulation at Cruise, NVIDIA, and NIO before starting Lightwheel in 2023. The company supplies SimReady 3D assets, egocentric human data, and robot evaluation tools to labs including NVIDIA, Google DeepMind, and Figure, and raised roughly $137.5 million in 2026 to expand its data and evaluation infrastructure.