Origin Lab announced on May 13 that it closed an $8 million seed funding round led by Lightspeed Ventures, with participation from SV Angel, Eniac, Seven Stars, FPV, Twitch co-founder Kevin Lin, and Cruise founder Kyle Vogt [1, 2].
The startup operates a marketplace that links video game companies and AI labs building world models. It converts digital game assets into formats suitable for AI training data [1, 2]. World models simulate physical behaviors and physics, helping AI systems understand and interact with the real world. Origin Lab co-CEO Anne-Margot Rodde said, "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" [1].
Origin Lab licenses footage from over 250 video games, covering more than 500,000 hours of content. Their datasets typically include 2 to 8 hours of walk-through videos or rendered sequences. The data contains images, audio, user input, spatial telemetry, physics, and game state annotations [2]. Rodde emphasized the company sources data via authorized licensing agreements rather than unauthorized scraping [2].
The $8 million investment reflects growing market recognition of video game data's value for AI training. Labs such as Yann LeCun's AMI Labs and Fei-Fei Li's World Labs have shown demand for these datasets [1, 2].
Origin Lab’s funding milestone marks its first external financing after building a significant licensed data repository. The company will use the new capital to expand its licensing agreements and scale its data marketplace platform [1, 2].
