General Intuition bets $2.3B on video games to train AI agents for the real world

The moment I stepped onto General Intuition's R&D floor in New York, the company's 31-year-old co-founder and CEO, Pim de Witte, pointed to a monitor on a standing desk. Someone appeared to be playing something like Fortnite — but it wasn't human.

"Our agent has been playing for 100 hours straight," said Kent Rollins, the chief product officer, beaming.

Before I could fully take in the sight of an AI navigating a virtual game environment, I heard the electronic footsteps of a large, four-legged robot approaching.

"The same brain running the game agent is also running the robot," de Witte told me.

Josh Duplantis, a data analyst carrying a laptop streaming a live feed from the robot's single camera, chimed in to explain that the bot's default mode was "exploration."

Using that camera — its one eye — the giant insect-like bot walked up to me, circled around, and continued into the office. It occasionally bumped into chair legs or an errant trash bin, much like a toddler still learning how her body relates to the world. Duplantis noted that it took just eight minutes of real-world robotics data to fine-tune an AI model for the quadruped. And that data had been collected on the street, not inside the office where the bot was navigating itself.

An agentic model that can generalize from gameplay to simulation to physical embodiment is at the core of General Intuition’s mission. And its ability to figure out its place in the world has attracted backing from some prominent names.

On Thursday, General Intuition announced it raised $320 million at a $2.3 billion valuation, confirming TechCrunch’s earlier reporting. The round brings the startup's total disclosed funding to $454 million, following the $134 million round it raised at launch in October last year.

The startup spun out from de Witte’s other company, Medal, which lets gamers upload and share video game clips. The hundreds of millions of hours of uploaded gameplay provided the initial dataset to train General Intuition’s model in spatial-temporal reasoning — understanding how to move through space and time.

But the key wasn't just the gameplay footage; it was the action labels embedded in those clips — records of exactly which buttons a player pressed and when. Most competitors, de Witte says, try to infer actions from video alone, which he argues isn't enough.

"We see this as the next stage of pre-training," de Witte said. "We have a single model that can respond to Fortnite information on screen and take actions, but also handle real-world dynamics in a way an LLM never could."

At one point, de Witte set me up with a laptop running General Intuition’s world model — a simulated environment generated frame-by-frame rather than rendered by a traditional game engine. As I often do when testing world models, I walked straight into a series of walls. In other demos I've tried, the agents sometimes pass right through, but this one didn’t. From millions of hours of gameplay, it somehow learned that walls are walls, ladders are for climbing, and shadows lengthen as the sun moves.

For General Intuition, this world model isn't the product — it's the training environment, internally called "the gym." The company ultimately wants to sell the agentic model itself. De Witte argues that the action data embedded in gameplay helps the model distinguish "self" from "environment," giving it a richer understanding of causality.

Impressive as General Intuition’s technology appears in demos, the company isn’t the only one working on this problem. Moreover, getting such a model to hold up in the physical world at scale hasn't been done yet. Most approaches of this kind require vast amounts of real-world data, gathered slowly and expensively. General Intuition’s bet is that gameplay offers a scalable shortcut.

Its investors are comfortable with that bet. General Intuition’s latest round was led by Khosla Ventures, with participation from General Catalyst, Jeff Bezos, Eric Schmidt, Nico Rosberg, and researchers at Google DeepMind and MIT.

The vast majority of the round will go toward scaling compute capacity. General Intuition has a deal with CoreWeave and plans to focus on pre-training the next version of the model. A portion is also set aside to make its API more broadly available by the end of summer.

Vinod Khosla, whose firm led the round, says he was drawn to de Witte’s vision and the company’s proprietary data position.

"If you look at LLMs, when reasoning emerged, it was a quantum leap," Khosla told me in a phone interview. "In world models, I think the quantum leap is the emergence of intuition in the AI — a human-like intuition. The human action and reaction data from games is key to that emergence."

The vision is a generational company

General Intuition draws on data from Medal’s video game clips. Image Credits:Medal.TV

General Intuition isn’t the only company that recognizes Medal’s human action data as a key piece for building dynamic world models and general agents. Brianna Martin, the startup’s chief of staff, said the company was born, in part, after Medal turned down an acquisition offer from a major lab. There have been other offers since.

De Witte and his co-founders — Eloi Alonso, Adam Jelley, and Vincent Micheli — aren’t interested in being acquired, and neither are the startup’s investors looking for an exit just yet. The amount and quality of proprietary data General Intuition has through Medal is one reason Khosla believes the startup is a generational bet, not an M&A target — that it could become the backbone for generalized agents and world models in simulation and the real world.

"At this point, it would be a data acquisition, which is sort of uninteresting," Khosla said.

Part of that bet also involves trusting de Witte’s values.

The entrepreneur spent three years working in the humanitarian space, including with Doctors Without Borders. As a result, he has drawn a clear line for how General Intuition’s technology will be used: no agents will be deployed to harm humans.

"We don’t want to be an escalatory part of the system," de Witte said. "If I came out and said, 'We’re doing lethal autonomy,' what do you think would happen in other countries?"

That limit on military use cases comes as Silicon Valley grows increasingly bullish on defense, though de Witte says he's happy for his models to be used in search and rescue missions.

De Witte is Dutch, and much of his team is European, which shapes the company’s identity. He says he brought on Martin partly because of her decision to publicly quit Palantir over its work with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

"I don’t know why Silicon Valley does what it does," he said. "There’s a reason I’m not there."

De Witte’s ethics don't just limit what the models won’t do. As a gamer who made $1.5 million building and hosting a private RuneScape server in his teens, he is also thinking about what happens to people left behind by what AI models can do.

General Intuition recently launched a platform called Nerve, a jobs marketplace that lets gamers earn money using their existing setups. Those who sign up start with data labeling and can eventually move toward robot teleoperation and other tasks. Medal’s user base, de Witte noted, is precisely the generation most exposed to AI-driven displacement, and he wants them to have a stake in what’s coming next.

A data flywheel

De Witte wants General Intuition to be an ecosystem enabler, like Anthropic or OpenAI — a model provider that lets others build on top of its technology. Today, the startup has a handful of customers in gaming, simulation, and robotics.

"We’re not going to build a self-driving car company," de Witte said. "We’re going to make it 10 times easier for the next person to build a self-driving car company."

The company says once its API is in more customers’ hands, it will be able to test its capabilities across a variety of use cases — like testing a robot in a digital twin of a factory floor, powering a human-like bot inside a gaming studio, or sending a quadruped to navigate hazardous environments.

While a quadruped is the first physical embodiment General Intuition has tried in the real world, it has also tested drones and other devices, including running the model in driving games.

"It works on anything you can control with a game controller or keyboard and mouse," de Witte said.

One of the goals is to build a data flywheel.

"We’ll pick customers where we can diversify the embodiments that this generalized foundation model serves as the backbone for," de Witte said. "We’ll prioritize customers who can offer real-world data that’s interesting and useful for moving the needle on research, and who have an agile internal team where we can be embedded partners and learn from each other."

Khosla said General Intuition’s proprietary data got it this far, and its ability to continue collecting data no one else has will be essential. Especially because, despite impressive demos, whether the simulation-to-real-world transfer holds at scale remains an open question that nobody has fully answered yet.

Correction: The headline previously misstated how much General Intuition raised in this round. The error has been fixed.