Origin Lab announced an $8 million seed funding round to develop a marketplace that connects video game companies with AI labs seeking data for world models. The round was 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.
Video Games as Data Source
Co-CEO and co-founder Anne-Margot Rodde explained, “The AI systems that are being built now need to understand how the physical world works and how things move. That data essentially lives in video games.” Rodde, alongside co-founders Antoine Gargot and Colin Carrier, aims to bridge the gap between the gaming industry and AI labs.
Marketplace Mechanics
Origin Lab will serve as a marketplace for labs like Yann LeCun’s AMI Labs and Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs to purchase high-quality licensed data from video game companies. Origin Lab converts gaming assets into usable training data, ranging from simple renderings to complex walkthrough footage.
Addressing Industry Challenges
Lab interest in video game footage has been hampered by licensing and data quality issues. In December 2024, OpenAI faced backlash when its Sora model reportedly used game footage from Twitch streams, indicating a need for legitimate channels for data acquisition. Amazon has also shown interest in using Twitch footage to train models.
Investment Interest
The successful fundraising reflects a growing market for startups providing essential data to AI labs. Faraz Fatemi of Lightspeed noted, “We’ve seen how sharp the revenue scaling can be for data vendors serving major labs. These are very well-capitalized businesses, and the bottleneck for all of them is data.”
Source: https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/13/origin-lab-raises-8m-to-help-video-game-companies-sell-data-to-world-model-builders/
