Lightspeed Venture Partners leads the round as the startup builds licensed infrastructure between game publishers and frontier AI labs
Origin Lab has closed an $8 million seed round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with participation from SV Angel, Eniac, Seven Stars, FPV, and a group of angel investors from robotics, AI, gaming, and Google, including Twitch co-founder Kevin Lin and Cruise founder Kyle Vogt.
The startup is building a platform that converts officially licensed video game worlds into structured, multimodal training data for AI labs developing world models. The funding will go toward scaling its capture, enrichment, QA, search, and delivery systems, along with its research work in world understanding and interactive simulation.
The problem Origin Lab is solving
As AI research pushes past language and static images, model developers increasingly need data that captures motion, physics, spatial relationships, and cause and effect: the kind of dynamic, interactive information that’s abundant inside video games but largely inaccessible in a clean, rights-cleared form. Until now, no dedicated platform existed to connect game publishers holding that content with the AI labs that need it.
Origin Lab positions itself as that missing link. The company partners directly with publishers to license game content at the source, capture it through proprietary pipelines, and enrich it with structured metadata before packaging it to a buyer’s specifications. It has already built exclusive partnerships with more than 20 publishers spanning over 50 titles, and is under contract with a major frontier AI lab.
What differentiates the datasets, according to the company, is that they’re rights-cleared and source-controlled from the outset, rather than scraped, and built for training purposes from the ground up. The metadata layered onto the raw video covers gameplay, camera movement, player inputs, scene composition, and environment state, aiming to teach models not just what a virtual world looks like but how it behaves.
What backers are saying
Faraz Fatemi, Partner at Lightspeed, framed the investment as a bet on a broader shift in AI research toward world modeling, one that requires a different class of data: licensed, structured, multimodal, and grounded in interactive environments. He described Origin Lab as building the connective layer between the game industry and labs training that next generation of models.
Anne-Margot Rodde, Origin Lab’s Co-CEO and Chief Commercial Officer, said the bottleneck was never a shortage of rich interactive data. Game studios have been generating it for decades, but the industry lacked a commercial and technical pipeline to bring it to market responsibly. She emphasized that the platform is built around consent, attribution, revenue share, and usage tracking from the start, arguing that’s the only version of the market that holds up long term.
Where the funding goes
The seed capital will expand Origin Lab’s capture and enrichment technology, deepen its publisher partnerships, and grow its engineering and research teams working on dataset creation, QA, annotation, search, and delivery tooling.
A new category: “Artificial World Intelligence”
Origin Lab has trademarked the term Artificial World Intelligence to describe this niche: licensed, structured data and systems built for AI that needs to understand, simulate, and act within complex environments. Games are the company’s starting point, since their combination of physics, interactivity, and controllable capture produces training signals that web-scraped data can’t replicate. The company also frames its applied research as extending beyond dataset delivery into the broader technical groundwork for training and evaluating AI in interactive worlds.
Leadership
The founding team draws on backgrounds across gaming, video platforms, and computer vision:
- Anne-Margot Rodde (Co-CEO, Chief Commercial Officer) began her career at PlayStation and Xbox, later founded a games marketing agency that worked with EA, Riot, Epic, and Nexon, and went on to found and run a game studio.
- Colin Carrier (Co-CEO, Chief Product Officer) was an early Twitch executive and its Chief Strategy Officer, helping grow the platform before its acquisition by Amazon, and has since founded companies at the intersection of AI, computer vision, and video.
- Antoine Gargot (CTO) brings a decade of experience in production data science and machine learning engineering.
About Origin Lab
Origin Lab operates a platform that licenses, captures, enriches, and delivers structured, rights-cleared training data sourced from video games, built to meet the specifications of AI researchers building world models. The company created the Artificial World Intelligence category and serves as the connective platform between game publishers and frontier AI labs. More at originlab.ai.