As AI begins to interact with the physical world, new types of labs are working to build world models that could be used to operate physical robotics or model objects in physical space. Unlike large language models, there isn\u2019t an easy source of data for those models, which has left many labs scrambling to assemble the necessary training sets.<\/p>\n
Now, one startup is emerging with an unlikely data source: the video game industry.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s the premise of Origin Lab, which just announced an $8 million seed funding round led by Lightspeed Ventures. SV Angel, Eniac, Seven Stars, and FPV also participated, with angel funding from Twitch co-founder Kevin Lin and Cruise founder Kyle Vogt.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe AI systems that are being built now need to understand how the physical world works and how things move,\u201d co-CEO and co-founder Anne-Margot Rodde told TechCrunch. \u201cThat data essentially lives in video games.\u201d The company\u2019s other co-founders (pictured above) are Antoine Gargot and Colin Carrier.<\/p>\n
In simple terms, Origin Lab will serve as a marketplace where world-model-focused labs such as Yann LeCun\u2019s AMI Labs or Fei-Fei Li\u2019s World Labs can buy high-quality licensed data. On the other side of the trade, video game companies can squeeze additional revenue out of the digital assets they\u2019ve already created. In the middle, Origin Lab will convert the video game assets into a form that works as training data \u2014 something that could be as simple as a rendering run or as complex as automating hours of walkthrough footage.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt 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,\u201d says Rodde. \u201cSo essentially, we built that bridge.\u201d<\/p>\n
Labs have long been interested in video game footage as a data source, but licensing and data-quality issues have often gotten in the way. In December 2024, OpenAI caused a minor scandal when the first version of its Sora video-generation model seemed to regurgitate footage of popular video games and streamers \u2014 presumably because it had been trained on Twitch streams. Amazon has been open about its interest in using Twitch footage to train models.<\/p>\n
Origin\u2019s success in fundraising is a sign of a growing market \u2014 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, says the success of companies like Scale AI has made the opportunity impossible to ignore.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ve seen how sharp the revenue scaling can be for data vendors that are serving the major labs,\u201d Fatemi told TechCrunch. \u201cThese are very well-capitalized businesses, and the bottleneck for all of them is data.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
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[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/techcrunch.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/Origin-Lab-Co-Founders.jpg?resize=1156,1200″] As AI begins to interact with the physical world, new types of labs are working to build world models that could be used to operate physical robotics or model objects in physical space. Unlike large language models, there isn\u2019t an easy source of data for those models, which has left many labs […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[226,62],"class_list":["post-1934255","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-crawlmanager","tag-techcrunch-com"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1934255","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1934255"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1934255\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1934255"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1934255"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1934255"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}