Origin Lab, a startup building a licensed data marketplace between the video game industry and AI labs developing 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.
The company, co-founded by Anne-Margot Rodde, Antoine Gargot, and Colin Carrier, is targeting a critical bottleneck in AI development: the scarcity 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 source, and Origin Lab argues that video games, with their richly simulated environments, represent an untapped solution.
Origin Lab acts as an intermediary, converting game assets into usable training data and connecting studios seeking additional revenue with labs such as Yann LeCun’s AMI Labs and Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs. Lightspeed partner Faraz Fatemi cited the sharp revenue scaling seen at data vendors like Scale AI as evidence of the opportunity.
Featured image: Credit: Origin Lab
