Origin Lab has secured $8 million in seed funding to build what it calls a marketplace connecting video game companies with AI labs hungry for training data. Lightspeed Ventures led the round, with participation from SV Angel, Eniac, Seven Stars, and FPV. Notable angel investors include Twitch co-founder Kevin Lin and Cruise founder Kyle Vogt.
The Los Angeles-based startup essentially acts as a middleman between two industries. On one side, world-model labs like Yann LeCun's AMI Labs or Fei-Fei Li's World Labs need massive amounts of data to train AI systems that understand how the physical world operates. On the other side, video game companies sit on troves of digital assets they could license for additional revenue. Origin Lab handles the conversion work — transforming game footage, rendered assets, and walkthrough recordings into formats suitable for AI training.
Co-CEO and co-founder Anne-Margot Rodde argued that video games represent an untapped data source precisely because they simulate physical reality with unprecedented detail. "The AI systems that are being built now need to understand how the physical world works and how things move," she told TechCrunch. "That data essentially lives in video games." She noted that no real infrastructure previously existed to connect AI labs with the gaming industry, prompting the company to "build that bridge."
The funding round reflects growing investor confidence in data suppliers serving the AI industry. Scale.AI's success has demonstrated the value of becoming an essential vendor to major AI labs, and Faraz Fatemi, the Lightspeed partner who led the Origin investment, pointed to that precedent as evidence the opportunity is too large to ignore. The timing matters because world models — AI systems designed to understand and simulate physical environments — have become a major focus for both research labs and investors, yet the data infrastructure for training such models remains fragmented.