Lucid (Founding)

Founding Year: 2025
Company Description: We are building generative simulations of the world powered by fast world models. Instead of using a physics or game engine with hard-coded rules to render each frame and decide how the environment reacts, this is done end-to-end through a neural network. Unlike text-to-video models, our world models generate frames conditioned on actions, enabling real-time interaction with any environment. Users can explore, manipulate objects, and shape their experience through natural gameplay. We trained a model to emulate Minecraft that runs smoothly on consumer hardware (1B param model runs at 25fps on an nvidia 4090 gaming gpu while other Minecraft world models run at <3fps). Our advantage in speed comes from aggressive latent compression (128x) that allows us to encode every frame into only 15 tokens while others traditionally use 256. We are now training on real-world footage and are building a general-purpose universe simulator.
Market: Consumer
Location: Berkeley, CA, USA
Coinvestors: YCombinator