Origin Lab Raises $8M Seed Led by Lightspeed

The company plans to use the funding to improve its software systems for data capture, enrichment, quality assurance, search, and delivery. It will also expand its applied research in world understanding, dataset intelligence, and interactive simulation.

As AI expands beyond text and images, advanced models need real-world data that includes motion, physics, space, actions, and cause-and-effect. Much of this data already exists in video games. Still, there has been no dedicated platform for legally connecting game publishers with AI companies that need structured, ready-to-use datasets. Origin Lab is building that bridge.

The company partners directly with game publishers to license game content at the source, process it through proprietary systems, add structured metadata, and deliver datasets tailored to customer needs. Origin Lab has already secured exclusive deals with more than 20 game publishers covering over 50 titles and is currently working with a leading frontier AI lab.

Unlike scraped video, Origin Lab provides datasets that are fully rights cleared and sourced directly from publishers, making them safe, and reliable for model training. It's systems capture high quality video, and add structured metadata, including gameplay actions, scene details, camera movement, player inputs and environment states, helping AI models understand not just how a world looks, but how it works.

Origin Lab calls this new category Artificial World Intelligence®, referring to licensed, structured data designed for AI systems that need to understand and interact with complex environments. The company’s first focus is video games, where rich worlds, physics, player actions, and interactive systems provide training data that cannot be replicated through web scraping.

Origin Lab is also investing in applied research to expand its platform beyond data delivery, aiming to support the training and evaluation of AI systems in complex, interactive environments.

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“AI has outgrown the data it started with. At the same time, game studios spent decades building some of the richest interactive environments in the world, but had no professional way to bring that data to market,” said Anne-Margot Rodde, Co-CEO and Chief Commercial Officer of Origin Lab. “The problem was never supply. The technical and commercial platform to access it did not exist. We built it. The only version of this market that works long term is one where both sides of the table have a reason to be there, consent, attribution revenue share and usage tracking built into the pipeline from day one.”

“Frontier AI is moving from understanding language to understanding worlds,” said Faraz Fatemi Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners. “That shift requires a different class of data, licensed, structured, multimodal, and grounded in interactive environments. Origin Lab is building the missing platform between the game industry and the AI labs training the next generation of world models.”

About Origin Lab

Founded in 2025 by Anne-Margot Rodde, Colin Carrier and Antoine Gargot, Origin Lab is a technology platform that turns licensed video game worlds into structured training data for AI models. The company works directly with game publishers to license, capture, enrich and package right's cleared multimodal datasets tailored to researcher's needs.

Its data includes detailed metadata from gameplay, scenes, camera movement, environments, and player interactions, making it usable for model training and analysis. Origin Lab pioneered the Artificial World Intelligence® category and connects game publishers with frontier AI labs building next-generation AI systems.

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