of India in the last few years online grocery delivery marketplace has grown significantly with the publicization of both Zomato and Swiggy and the rise in the number of cloud kitchens. Meanwhile, startups working on home services like on-demand home worker platforms like Urban Company, A quick bitand Prontohas gained popularity.
Silicon Valley based startup Human archive is capitalizing on this trend by partnering with these companies to have workers wear special caps with cameras to collect egocentric (first-person perspective) video data of daily tasks that can be used to train robots.
Without naming specific partners, the startup said it works with companies in the home services, hotel and restaurant sectors to collect egocentric data and has more than 1,000 active headsets deployed in multiple locations.
On Tuesday, Human Archive said it raised $8.2 million in angel funding from Wing Venture Capital, NVP Capital, Y Combinator and OpenAI, Nvidia, Google, Mercor, AfterQuery, BAIR, SAIL, Brad Boa and Meta.
The startup was founded by three students from UC Berkeley and one from Stanford — Samay Maini, Rushil Agarwal, Shloke Patel and Raj Patel, the latter two of whom are cousins. (Raj Patel is the CEO.) All four have research backgrounds that span robotics, hardware, and tactile information.
The company’s creation is a direct bet on where the AI industry is headed. As robotics labs and frontier AI companies race to create machines that can perform physical tasks in the real world, they face a critical bottleneck—a lack of high-quality, real-world training data that illustrates the everyday tasks of humans. Human Archive’s bet is that workers in India’s burgeoning gig economy represent an untapped and scalable source of precisely this data.
While Human Archive is working with multiple partners, the startup said it has been turned down for collaboration by many Indian home services companies, including Pronto and Urban Company.
The company’s rejection by major players, the Indian edition of Entrackr, became public fodder last weekend. informed Pronto is actively seeking partnerships to collect employee data for robotics training, and Snabbit was in early discussions with Human Archive before the project fell apart.
Abhiraj Singh Bhal, CEO of Urban he answered At X, stating that the company would not engage in such arrangements – he forced Patel to do so fire back Urban Company will soon be forced to reconsider or risk losing loyalty due to customer loss. Co-founder Rushil Agarwal was still open, writing that Pronto founder Anjali Sardana. he laughed against him and called him an “idiot” when he raised the idea of data sharing. Pronto acknowledged the talks but said he chose not to move forward.
Other startups around the country are collecting egocentric data different work environmentsincluding factory floors. To differentiate itself, the Human Archive is using and developing additional devices such as touch gloves, a full-body motion suit and wrist cameras to capture data including RGB-D-synchronized movement and touch force to sell to AI labs. The startup believes that video data alone is not enough, but combining it with other sensor data makes it more valuable.
Initially, Human Archive used temporary installations or off-the-shelf installations to capture data. Now it works on individual hardware that works together and captures different types of data. It already has over 50 different devices deployed to collect various data points.
“To collect data, we started with iPhones; then we built our own custom devices and cases. Now we have over seven different hardware products that we use interchangeably in different ways. After collecting data from different devices, we worked on synchronizing data from all these different sources,” Patel said on the call.
The company said it is developing ways to adjust AI models with its own data and test them on robots to assess the effectiveness of tasks. By doing so, the startup can demonstrate the quality of its data to potential customers and post-training internal models.
Wing VC partner Zach DeWitt said the startup has a unique advantage in collecting data from multiple sensors.
“No one in the world has been able to synchronize and collect headset RGB-D, amplify feedback, capture full-body motion, and scale synchronized chest and wrist camera data. They train internal models on this data, and every major lab and university is interested in experimenting with it because of the innovation of the sensors and the scale of the new technology,” he said.
Data collection and expansion plans in India
Despite rejection from prominent players in the home services industry, Human Archive has teamed up with smaller startups to offer discounted services to customers. When a worker comes home, consumers are offered a choice through the app: pay a discounted price in exchange for agreeing to data collection, or pay full price for an unrecorded visit.
Patel noted that customers are happy to choose the former because service quality disputes are common and video recordings can help resolve them.
The company pays employees a base fee of $1 an hour to participate in egocentric data collection. Other companies pay ₹250 to ₹400 (about $2.63 to $4.20) an hour, the Economic Times report said. Patel said competitors pay more than Human Archives, but being on the ground in India allows him to keep compensation low.
“The Human Archive network provides instant, flexible revenue opportunities on a global scale, lowering the barrier to participation in the AI economy. We see this as a critical bridge that immediately funds livelihoods while building infrastructure for a safer, more productive future,” said DeWitt.
Aside from payroll, there are privacy concerns about data collection through video recording. It is not clear what information the Human Archives gives employees about how their personnel is being used. The company said its commercial contracts are in line with those of India Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Actas it displays a privacy policy notice with consent information detailing the purpose of data collection and how it is processed. The company said all data was anonymized and faces were blurred from the posts. Moneycontrol last week informed India’s Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology is investigating the consent mechanisms and data collection practices of startups that collect egocentric data through home service workers.
Although the Human Archive collects data primarily in India, it has begun expanding into Southeast Asia and the United States. The company is also building a platform for anyone to participate in data collection and earn money. It also wants to offer services such as cleaning or cooking to customers in the US in exchange for data collection by participating employees – although these programs are in early pilot stages.
There are many well-funded startups race to build physical AI. Doing so requires vast amounts of training data that show people at work—and the Human Archive is one of the players competing to fulfill that demand. Whether its approach scales will depend on the partnerships it strikes and the uniqueness and volume of data it can collect to satisfy the appetite of physical AI labs.
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