Medal Spins Off AI Lab General Intuition with $137M Seed Round

Game video-sharing platform Medal has launched a new AI research division, General Intuition, backed by a $137.7 million seed round led by Khosla Ventures and General Catalyst, with participation from Raine. The startup aims to harness Medal's extensive library of gaming videos—2 billion clips annually from 10 million monthly active users—to train foundational AI models focused on spatiotemporal reasoning, the ability to understand how objects move through space and time.

Why Gaming Data Matters

General Intuition CEO Pim de Witte argues that Medal’s dataset outperforms alternatives like Twitch or YouTube for AI training. Player-uploaded clips often capture extreme scenarios—either highly positive or negative outcomes—providing "edge cases" critical for robust model training. "You get a selection bias that precisely points to the type of data you really want," de Witte explained.

The lab’s proprietary models can navigate untrained environments using only visual input, mimicking human gameplay. This approach has potential applications in robotics (e.g., drones, autonomous vehicles) since many physical systems are controlled via interfaces similar to gaming controllers.

Strategic Differentiation

Unlike competitors such as DeepMind or World Labs, which monetize world models directly, General Intuition avoids copyright conflicts by focusing on non-commercial applications:

• Gaming: Developing adaptive NPCs that adjust difficulty dynamically.
• Search-and-rescue: Training drones to operate in GPS-denied environments.

The company also plans to generate synthetic worlds for agent training and enable AI navigation of unfamiliar physical spaces.

Investor Confidence in Spatial Intelligence

The funding reflects growing interest in spatial intelligence, a niche distinct from text- or image-based AI. De Witte and Lightspeed Ventures partner Moritz Baier-Lentz argue that spatiotemporal reasoning is pivotal for achieving artificial general intelligence (AGI). "Large language models lack fundamental intuition about how the physical world works," de Witte noted.

Key Points:

• $137.7M seed round led by Khosla Ventures and General Catalyst.
• Focus on spatiotemporal reasoning using Medal’s gaming video dataset.
• Applications include adaptive NPCs, rescue drones, and AGI development.
• Avoids direct competition with game developers to sidestep copyright issues.