Origin Lab raises $8M to help video game companies sell data to world-class developers

As AI begins to interact with the physical world, new types of labs are being built examples of the world which can be used to operate physical robotics or model objects in space. Unlike large language samples, there is no way to access data for those samples, which has left many laboratories scrambling to collect training materials.

Now, one startup is coming from an unlikely source: the video game industry.

That is the basis of it Origin Labwhich has just announced an 8 million dollar investment led by Lightspeed Ventures. SV Angel, Eniac, Seven Stars, and FPV also participated, with angel support from Twitch co-founder Kevin Lin and Cruise founder Kyle Vogt.

“The AI ​​systems that are being built now need to understand how the world works and how things work,” Co-CEO and co-founder Anne-Margot Rodde told TechCrunch. “The information lives in video games.” The company’s co-founders (pictured above) are Antoine Gargot and Colin Carrier.

In simple terms, Origin Lab will act as a marketplace where the world’s leading labs such as Yann LeCun’s AMI Labs or Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs they can buy more advanced licenses. On the other side of the business, video game companies can squeeze additional revenue from the digital content they have already created. At the center, Origin Lab will transform video game content into a format that serves as training data — something that can be as simple as a chase or as complex as hours of automated training.

“It became clear that the video game industry was on the cutting edge, but there was no real way or tools to connect AI labs with the video game industry,” says Rodde. “So, we built the bridge.”

Labs have long favored video game consoles as a data source, but licensing and data quality issues are often problematic. In December 2024OpenAI embarrassed the little ones when the first version of its Sora video-generation model seemed to be reproducing popular video games and streamers – perhaps because they had been trained on Twitch streams. Amazon has opened about his interest in using Twitch animations teaching models.

Origin’s success in generating revenue is a sign of a growing market — not just for academic data, but for startups that can act as assistants to major AI labs. Faraz Fatemi, a partner at Lightspeed who led Origin’s investment, says the success of companies like Scale AI has created an opportunity that cannot be ignored.

“We’ve seen the revenue increase for data vendors serving large labs,” Fatemi told TechCrunch. “These are very lucrative businesses, and the bottleneck for all of them is data.”