Cambridge-based startup Worldmodeldata has raised £7 million in seed funding as it emerged from stealth. The round was led by Iona Star Capital, a London-based venture capital firm focused on early-stage companies in artificial intelligence, data and technology.
Founded by serial entrepreneur Rhea Loucas, the company is building a database of video game-generated training data for AI systems known as world models, which are designed to understand and predict how environments change over time. Lord Richard Allan, former vice president of public policy at Meta and a UK technology policy specialist, has joined the company's board as chairman.
Worldmodeldata aggregates and structures gameplay data from modern video games to create datasets for organisations developing world models, physical AI systems and robotics. The data is sourced through licensing agreements with game developers and communities, including titles built on Unreal and Unity, rather than through web scraping.
The platform targets what the company describes as a growing shortage of high-quality training data for AI systems that need to understand complex environments and make decisions in real-world settings. Potential applications include autonomous vehicles, where world models can be used to simulate traffic conditions and predict pedestrian movement.
Rhea Loucas said the company was founded to address the growing need for large-scale training data for world models:
World models represent a significant shift in AI, but they require large-scale datasets that enable systems to understand and reason about physical environments. Video games provide rich, controlled environments that can generate the data needed to train these models, and our goal is to make that data available at scale.
The funding will support product development, team expansion and new data licensing agreements as Worldmodeldata works towards building a library of one million hours of training data by the end of next year.
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