SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 13, 2026--
Origin Lab, the technology platform turning licensed game worlds into structured training data for world models and multimodal AI, today announced an $8M seed round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. The financing will accelerate Origin Lab’s software, capture, enrichment, QA, search, and delivery systems, while expanding its applied research work in world understanding, dataset intelligence, and interactive simulation. SV Angel, Eniac, Seven Stars, FPV and angels from robotics, AI, gaming, and Google also participated, including Twitch Co-Founder Kevin Lin and Cruise Founder Kyle Vogt.
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As AI moves beyond language and static images, frontier models need data that reflects how the world actually works: motion, physics, spatial structure, action, environment state, and cause and effect. Much of that data already exists inside video games, but until now there has been no professional platform connecting game publishers to the AI labs that need legally accessed, structured, researcher-ready data. Origin Lab is building that platform.
The company works directly with video game publishers to license game-world content at the source, capture it through proprietary pipelines, enrich it with structured metadata, and package datasets to buyer specification. Origin Lab has already secured exclusive partnerships with more than 20 game publishers representing more than 50 titles and is under contract with a leading frontier AI lab.
Unlike scraped video, Origin Lab’s datasets are rights-cleared, source-controlled, and designed for model training from the start. Its capture and enrichment systems can pair high-fidelity video with structured metadata across gameplay, scene composition, camera movement, player inputs, environment state, and other signals that help AI systems learn not just what a world looks like, but how it behaves.
“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.”
The seed financing will be used to expand Origin Lab’s capture and enrichment technology, deepen partnerships with video game publishers, and grow the engineering and research teams building tools for dataset creation, QA, search, annotation, packaging, and delivery.
“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. It was that 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.”
Origin Lab calls this emerging category Artificial World Intelligence®: licensed, structured data and systems for AI models that must understand, simulate, and interact with complex environments. The company’s initial focus is video games, where high-quality worlds, interactivity, physics, player behavior, and controllable capture can produce training signals that cannot be reproduced from web-scale scraping alone. Origin Lab’s applied research efforts extend the platform beyond data delivery toward the technical foundation for training and evaluating AI systems in complex interactive worlds.
The founding team brings deep experience across games, video, AI, computer vision, and rights-driven content markets. Rodde started her career working with PlayStation and Xbox, then founded and ran a games marketing agency working with studios and publishers such as EA, Riot, Epic, and Nexon, before founding and scaling a game studio. Co-CEO and Chief Product Officer Colin Carrier was an early Twitch executive and Chief Strategy Officer, helping build one of the defining consumer video platforms across gaming, creators, music, and entertainment before Amazon's acquisition. He has since founded companies at the intersection of AI, computer vision, gaming, and video. CTO Antoine Gargot brings a decade of experience in production data science and machine learning engineering.
About Origin Lab
Origin Lab is the technology platform turning licensed game worlds into structured training data for world models and multimodal AI. The company works directly with video game publishers to license, capture, enrich, QA, search, package, and deliver rights-cleared multimodal training data built to researcher specification. Origin Lab’s datasets are structured for query and model training, with metadata across gameplay, scene, camera, environment, and interaction signals. Origin Lab pioneered the Artificial World Intelligence® category and operates the platform connecting video game publishers to the frontier AI labs building the next generation of AI systems. Learn more at originlab.ai.
About Lightspeed Venture Partners
Lightspeed is a global, multi-stage, venture capital firm managing over $50B in assets. Since its founding in 2000, Lightspeed has been the first investor and an early backer of some of the most innovative companies in the world including Abridge, Anthropic, Anduril, Castelion, Databricks, Glean, Mistral, Navan, Neko Health, Netskope, Reflection AI, Rubrik, Snap, Skild AI, Vinted, Wiz, and more. Learn more about the firm, team, and why we’re bullish on the potential of AI to transform the world at lsvp.com.
Antoine Gargot, Colin Carrier, and Anne-Margot Rodde
COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — Alex Murdaugh’s murder convictions and life sentence for the deaths of his wife and son were overturned Wednesday by the South Carolina Supreme Court because the court clerk at his trial suggested he was guilty.
But the disgraced lawyer won’t be leaving prison anytime soon.
Prosecutors say they plan to retry Murdaugh, which likely means there will be another lengthy trial for the case that because of the combination of money, power, Southern accents and treachery has become a true crime sensation with several streaming miniseries, best selling books and dozens of true crime podcasts.
Murdaugh, 57, will remain in prison. He pleaded guilty to stealing around $12 million from his clients and currently is serving a 40-year federal sentence at the same time as a 27-year state sentence for his financial crimes.
Prosecutors haven't closed the door on appealing the ruling, but said Wednesday they are concentrating on aggressively seek to try Murdaugh again on the murder charges preferably sometime in 2026. State Attorney General Alan Wilson saying he respected the court's decision but no one is above the law.
Murdaugh's lawyers pointed out that trial will look a lot different, as the justices also ruled days of evidence at the murder trial about how Murdaugh stole from clients, many of them in dire straits, shouldn't be allowed next time.
Still, the ruling is a win for Murdaugh, who admits to being a thief, liar, insurance cheat and bad lawyer, but has adamantly denied killing his wife Maggie and younger son Paul since he found their bodies outside their home in 2021.
“Alex has said from day one that he did not kill his wife and son. We look forward to a new trial,” Murdaugh’s lawyers Dick Harpootlian and Jim Griffin said in a joint statement.
The defense has detailed the lack of physical evidence — no DNA or blood was found splattered on Murdaugh or any of his clothes, even though the killings were at close range with powerful weapons that were never found.
Prosecutors argued that the clerk’s comments were fleeting and the evidence against Murdaugh was overwhelming.
Murdaugh told investigators for months he hadn’t seen his wife and son for about an hour before they were killed. But investigators eventually cracked the passcode on Paul Murdaugh’s phone and found a video with a barking dog and Alex Murdaugh’s voice admonishing it five minutes before the young man stopped using his phone.
Investigators said Murdaugh was addicted to opioids and his complex schemes to steal money from clients and his family’s law firm were starting to unravel so he killed his wife and son to divert attention and buy time to find a way out of his problems.
In their unanimous ruling Wednesday, the South Carolina Supreme Court said the conduct by Colleton County Clerk of Court Becky Hill “egregiously attacked Murdaugh’s credibility” by suggesting to jurors his testimony could not be trusted.
A few jurors said Hill, assigned to oversee the evidence and the jury during the trial, told them to watch Murdaugh's body language when he testified in his own defense and to not be fooled, confused or thrown off by what he might say.
“By urging the jurors not to be fooled or convinced by Murdaugh’s defense, Hill essentially implored the jurors to find him guilty, the ultimate issue in the case,” the justices wrote, adding that the comments insinuated there was something unusual and suspicious about his decision to testify.
Hill “placed her fingers on the scales of justice, thereby denying Murdaugh his right to a fair trial by an impartial jury,” the justices wrote. “Our justice system provides — indeed demands — that every person is entitled to a fair trial."
The court said Hill's motivation was the “siren call of celebrity” and her goal was to increase sales of her book on the trial called “Behind the Doors of Justice: The Murdaugh Murders.” It was pulled from publication after plagiarism allegations were made.
“As her book’s title suggests, it turns out Hill was quite busy behind the doors of justice, thwarting the integrity of the justice system she was sworn to protect and uphold,” the justices wrote in an unsigned 27-page ruling.
Hill’s attorney in her criminal case didn’t return a phone call or email seeking comment.
Hill has pleaded guilty to lying about what she said and did during the Murdaugh trial, including showing graphic crime scene photos to several media members. The journalists were not named and the photos were not described at her December hearing.
“The court rightly described her conduct as "‘breathtaking,’ ‘disgraceful,’ and ‘unprecedented in South Carolina,' ” Murdaugh's lawyers said.
The justices also had a warning for the next judge to try the murder case — be cautious on how much evidence of Murdaugh's thefts from his law firm and clients to allow those jurors to hear.
Some brief evidence of how Murdaugh stole is fine and how it might connect to him killing his wife and son. But the court said details like how some of the people Murdaugh stole from were disabled or vulnerable could unfairly turn against him jurors who should be focused just on whether he killed his family.
The chief prosecutor in the case said he doesn't regret piling on all the financial crime evidence he could in the initial trial because if the jury finds Murdaugh not guilty, they can't try him again,
“You don’t hit a home run if you’re afraid to strike out,” prosecutor Creighton Waters said at a Wednesday news conference.
Wilson is a Republican running for South Carolina's open governor's seat this year. He said politics won't play into any of his decisions on this case and it is the employees of the office, not its elected leader who will the backbone of the prosecution.
“The decision on whether to nor to purse this case is not going to be built on who the next occupant of my office” is, Wilson said. "It’s going to be built on should we seek justice or not.”
FILE - Alex Murdaugh, convicted of killing his wife, Maggie, and younger son, Paul, in June 2021, listens during a hearing on the motion for a retrial, Jan. 16, 2024, at the Richland County Judicial Center in Columbia, S.C. (Gavin McIntyre/The Post and Courier via AP, Pool, File)
FILE - Former Colleton County Clerk of Court Mary Rebecca "Becky" Hill listens during her guilty plea, Dec. 8, 2025, in St. Matthews, S.C. (AP Photo/Jeffrey Collins, File)
FILE - Disbarred attorney Alex Murdaugh arrives in court in Beaufort, S.C., Sept. 14, 2023. (AP Photo/James Pollard, File)
