As artificial intelligence begins to engage with the physical world, a new wave of labs is emerging to develop "world models"—systems that can operate physical robots or simulate objects in real space. Unlike large language models, these models lack an easily accessible data source, forcing many research teams to scramble to assemble the training sets they need. This challenge is precisely what Origin Lab aims to solve. The company has just announced an $8 million seed funding round led by Lightspeed Ventures, with participation from SV Angel, Eniac, Seven Stars, and FPV. Additional angel investors include Twitch co-founder Kevin Lin and Cruise founder Kyle Vogt. "That data essentially lives in video games," the company explains.

In essence, Origin Lab will function as a marketplace where world-model-focused labs—such as Yann LeCun’s AMI Labs or Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs—can purchase high-quality, licensed data. On the other side of the transaction, video game companies can generate extra revenue from the digital assets they’ve already created. Origin Lab acts as the intermediary, converting video game assets into usable training data. This process can range from something as straightforward as a rendering run to something as complex as automating hours of walkthrough footage. "It became clear that the video game industry was sitting on some incredibly valuable data, but there was no real way or infrastructure to basically connect AI labs and the video game industry," says Rodde. "So essentially, we built that bridge."

Labs have long recognized the potential of video game footage as a data source, but licensing hurdles and data quality concerns have frequently blocked progress. In December 2024, OpenAI sparked a minor controversy when the first version of its Sora video-generation model appeared to regurgitate footage from popular video games and streamers—likely because it had been trained on Twitch streams. Amazon has also been open about its interest in using Twitch footage to train models. Origin’s success in raising funds signals a growing market—not just for training data, but for startups that can serve as essential suppliers to major AI labs. Faraz Fatemi, a partner at Lightspeed who led the Origin investment, notes that the success of companies like Scale AI has made this opportunity impossible to ignore. "These are very well-capitalized businesses, and the bottleneck for all of them is data."