AI data platform levels up with funding raise

A Cambridge-based artificial intelligence start-up has secured £7 million to accelerate the development of a vast training data platform designed to support the next generation of AI systems.

Worldmodeldata has emerged from stealth with a seed funding round led by London-based venture capital firm Iona Star Capital. 

Founded by entrepreneur Rhea Loucas, the business is building what it aims to become the world’s largest library of video game-generated training data. 

The platform aggregates and structures data from gameplay in titles built on engines such as Unreal and Unity, providing AI developers with datasets that reflect real human behaviour in dynamic environments.

Unlike web-scraped data, the content is acquired through licensing agreements with game developers, allowing creators and players to monetise their assets and gameplay.

Worldmodeldata’s technology addresses a growing shortage of high-quality data needed to train ‘world models’ – AI systems capable of understanding how environments change over time and predicting future outcomes. 

Such models could support applications including robotics and autonomous vehicles.

Rhea says the investment will fund product development, team expansion and new data licensing agreements.

She adds that Worldmodeldata aims to expand its data library to one million hours by the end of 2026, significantly surpassing the current largest database, which contains around 40,000 hours.

Rhea said: “World models represent a fundamental paradigm shift in AI, but progress like this needs fuel: internet-scale data to help AI systems make predictions and reason in physical environments. 

“Such a comprehensive dataset does not yet exist; however, video games, as safe, controlled environments, are the perfect setting for generating the action-conditioned data needed to train the next generation of AI at the required scale. 

“Worldmodeldata is built to bridge that gap.”

As part of the fundraise, Lord Richard Allan, the UK’s former technology policy adviser and Meta’s former vice president of public policy, has also joined the company as chairman.

He added: “We are proud to anchor ourselves in the UK’s AI ecosystem, a strategic choice driven by the urgent push for sovereign AI capabilities and the robust infrastructure that powers them. 

“The deep expertise of this team is hugely exciting and positions them perfectly to lead this charge. 

“In tackling critical gaps that LLMs cannot bridge, this isn’t about improving AI model training, but building an essential foundation for deploying AI in sectors where the demand is vast but the solutions remain limited.” 

Gerry Buggy, from Iona Star, added: “AI spent the last few years learning to describe the world, constrained primarily by compute and architecture. 

“The next era is about acting in it, and you cannot learn to act from passive video or text, because acting requires having seen how the world answers back. 

“That coupling between action and consequence is the scarcest resource in AI today. 

“Worldmodeldata is manufacturing that missing ingredient, and every company building Physical AI or Digital AI will eventually face the same challenge. 

“That conviction is what led IonaStar to lead the investment in Worldmodeldata, and that is why I joined the board.”

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