Origin Lab raises $8M seed led by Lightspeed to build platform that turns video game worlds into training data for AI

Origin Lab raises $8M seed led by Lightspeed to build platform that turns video game worlds into training data for AI

Origin Lab’s proprietary capture and enrichment platform transforms officially licensed game worlds into multimodal training data for AI Labs to build next-generation world models

Origin Lab, a technology platform that turns licensed game worlds into world models and structured training data for multimodal AI, today announced an $8 million seed round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. This funding will accelerate Origin Lab’s software, capture, enrichment, QA, search, and delivery systems, as well as expand its applied research efforts in world understanding, dataset intelligence, and interactive simulation. SV Angel, Eniac, Seven Stars, FPV, and other angels from robotics, AI, gaming, and Google, including Twitch co-founder Kevin Lin and Cruise founder Kyle Vogt, also participated.

This press release features multimedia. Read the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260513129175/en/

Antoine Gargot, Colin Carrier, Anne-Margot Rodd

As AI evolves beyond language and static images, frontier models will require data that reflects how the world actually works: movement, physics, spatial structure, behavior, environmental conditions, and cause and effect. Much of that data already exists within video games, but until now there hasn’t been a specialized platform connecting AI labs and game publishers who need data that is legally accessible, structured, and available to researchers. Origin Lab is building that platform.

The company works directly with video game publishers to license game world content at source, capture it through proprietary pipelines, enrich it with structured metadata, and package datasets to the buyer’s specifications. Origin Lab has already secured exclusive partnerships with more than 20 game publishers representing more than 50 titles, and has signed an agreement with leading Frontier AI Labs.

Unlike scraped videos, Origin Lab datasets are rights-cleared, source-controlled, and designed from the ground up for model training. Its capture and enrichment systems can combine high-fidelity video with structured metadata across gameplay, scene composition, camera movement, player input, environmental state, and other signals to help AI systems learn not just what the world looks like, but how it behaves.

“Frontier AI is moving from understanding language to understanding the world,” said Faraz Fatemi, Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners. “That change requires a different class of data that is licensed, structured, multimodal, and based in an interactive environment. Origin Lab is building the missing platform between the gaming industry and the AI labs training the next generation of world models.”

The seed funding will be used to expand Origin Lab’s capture and enrichment technology, deepen partnerships with video game publishers, and grow its engineering and research teams to build tools for dataset creation, QA, search, annotation, packaging, and distribution.

“AI has outgrown its original data. At the same time, game studios have spent decades building the world’s richest interactive environments but had no professional way to bring that data to market,” said Ann Margot Rodde, co-CEO and chief commercial officer of Origin Lab. “The problem was never supply. It was that the technical and commercial platforms to access it didn’t exist. We built it. The only version of this market that will work long term is one that has a reason to exist on both sides of the table: consent, attribution, revenue sharing, usage tracking built into the pipeline from day one.”

Origin Lab calls this an emerging category Artificial World Intelligence®: Licensed structured data and systems for AI models that need to understand, simulate, and interact with complex environments. The company’s initial focus is on video games, where high-quality worlds, interactivity, physics, player movement, and controllable capture generate training signals that cannot be replicated by web-scale scraping alone. Origin Lab’s applied research efforts extend the platform beyond data delivery to a technological foundation for training and evaluating AI systems in a complex, interactive world.

The founding team brings deep experience across games, video, AI, computer vision, and rights-driven content markets. Rodde started his career at PlayStation and Xbox, then founded and ran a game marketing agency working with studios and publishers like EA, Riot, Epic, and Nexon, before founding and scaling a game studio. Co-CEO and Chief Product Officer Colin Carrier was an early executive and chief strategy officer at Twitch prior to its acquisition by Amazon, where he helped build one of the definitive consumer video platforms across games, creators, music and entertainment. Since then, he has built companies at the intersection of AI, computer vision, gaming, and video. CTO Antoine Gargot brings 10 years of experience in production data science and machine learning engineering.

About Origin Lab

Origin Lab is a technology platform that transforms licensed game worlds into world models and structured training data for multimodal AI. The company works directly with video game publishers to license, acquire, enrich, QA, search, package, and distribute rights-cleared multimodal training data built to researchers’ specifications. Origin Lab datasets are structured for querying and model training with metadata spanning gameplay, scenes, cameras, environments, and interaction signals. Origin Lab is a pioneer in the Artificial World Intelligence® category, operating a platform that connects video game publishers to frontier AI labs building next-generation AI systems. For more information, please visit originlab.ai.

About Lightspeed Venture Partners

Lightspeed is a global, multi-stage venture capital firm with over $50 billion in assets under management. Since its founding in 2000, Lightspeed has been an original investor and early supporter of some of the world’s most innovative companies, including Abridge, Anthropic, Anduril, Castellion, Databricks, Glean, Mistral, Navan, Neko Health, Netskope, Reflection AI, Rubrik, Snap, Skild AI, Vinted, Wiz, and more. To learn more about our company, our team, and why we’re bullish on AI’s potential to change the world, visit lsvp.com.