Origin Lab Raises $8M to Sell Video Game Data to World-Model Builders

Origin Lab has raised $8 million in seed funding to create a marketplace connecting video game companies with AI labs building world models. The round was led by Lightspeed Ventures, with participation from SV Angel, Eniac, Seven Stars, FPV, and angel investors Kevin Lin (Twitch co-founder) and Kyle Vogt (Cruise founder). The startup converts video game assets into training data for physical-world AI systems, addressing a data bottleneck faced by labs like Yann LeCun's AMI Labs and Fei-Fei Li's World Labs. Co-CEO Anne-Margot Rodde noted that video games contain essential data on physical movement and interactions. The funding signals growing demand for specialized data suppliers to major AI labs, as highlighted by Lightspeed partner Faraz Fatemi, who cited the revenue scaling of companies like Scale.AI. Origin Lab aims to solve licensing and data quality issues that have hindered previous efforts, such as OpenAI's Sora model controversy in December 2024 involving unlicensed Twitch footage.