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’t an easy source of data for those models, which has left many labs scrambling to assemble the necessary training sets.

Now, one startup is emerging with an unlikely data source: the video game industry.

That’s 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.

“The AI systems that are being built now need to understand how the physical world works and how things move,” co-CEO and co-founder Anne-Margot Rodde told TechCrunch. “That data essentially lives in video games.”

In simple terms, Origin Lab will serve as a marketplace where world-model-focused labs such as Yann LeCun’s AMI Labs or Fei-Fei Li’s 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’ve already created. In the middle, Origin Lab will convert the video game assets into a form that works as training data — something that could be as simple as a rendering run or 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.”