Origin Lab, a startup building a licensed data marketplace between the video game industry and AI labs that develop world models, has raised $8 million in seed funding led by Lightspeed Ventures with participation from SV Angel, Eniac, Seven Stars, and FPV. Angel investors include Twitch co-founder Kevin Lin and Cruise founder Kyle Vogt.
Co-founded by Anne-Margot Rodde, Antoine Gargot, and Colin Carrier, the company targets a critical bottleneck in AI development: the lack of high-quality physical world training data for world models (AI systems designed to understand how objects move and interact in real space). Unlike large language models, world models have no obvious data sources. Origin Lab claims that video games with richly simulated environments are a greenfield solution.
Origin Lab acts as a middleman, converting game assets into usable training data and connecting studios looking for additional revenue with labs like Yann LeCun’s AMI Labs and Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs. Lightspeed partner Faraz Fatemi points to the rapid revenue growth seen at data vendors like Scale AI as evidence of opportunity.
Featured image: Credit: Origin Lab
