This startup is betting India’s gig economy can train the world’s robots

In the last few years, India online food delivery market has grown significantly, with both Zomato and Swiggy going public and the number of cloud kitchens increasing. Meanwhile, startups dealing with home services, such as on-demand platforms for domestic workers such as Urban Company, Snabbit and Pronto, have gained popularity.

Start-up from Silicon Valley Human archive is tapping into this trend and working with these companies to have employees wear special hats with cameras to collect egocentric (first-person perspective) video data of everyday tasks that can be used to train robots.

Without naming specific partners, the startup said it is working with companies in the home services, hotel and restaurant industries to collect egocentric data, and has deployed more than 1,000 active headsets across multiple locations.

Based on that traction, Human Archive said Tuesday it has raised $8.2 million in funding from Wing Venture Capital, NVP Capital, Y Combinator and angels from 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 being cousins. (Raj Patel is CEO.) All four have research backgrounds in robotics, hardware and tactile data.

The company’s creation is a direct bet on where the AI ​​industry is going. As robotics labs and groundbreaking AI companies rush to build machines that can perform physical tasks in the real world, they face a critical bottleneck: a shortage of high-quality real-world training data that shows humans doing the day-to-day work. Human Archive’s bet is that the workers who staff India’s booming gig economy represent an untapped and scalable source of exactly that data.

Although Human Archive works with multiple partners, the startup said it was rejected for a partnership by many Indian home services companies, including Pronto and Urban Company.

The company’s rejection by major players became public fodder last weekend, when Indian outlet Entrackr reported that Pronto is actively seeking partnerships to collect employee data for robotics training and that Snabbit had had early discussions with Human Archive before the project fell apart.

Abhiraj Singh Bhal, CEO of Urban Company responded on X, stating that the company would not enter into such arrangements – prompting Patel fire back that Urban Company would soon be forced to reconsider or risk losing relevance to churn. Co-founder Rushil Agarwal was even more blunt, writing that Pronto founder Anjali Sardana had laughed at him and called him “stupid” when he brought up the idea of ​​a data partnership. Pronto acknowledged the talks but said it chose not to move forward. The startup denied calling Agarwal ‘stupid’.

Across the country, other startups are collecting self-centered data different working environmentsincluding factory floors. To differentiate itself, Human Archive is using and developing additional devices, such as tactile gloves, a full-body motion capture suit, and wrist cameras to capture data, including motion and tactile force, synchronously aligned with RGB-D (real-time color imagery combined with depth information), to sell to AI labs. The startup believes that video data alone is not enough, but linking it to other sensor data makes it much more valuable.

Initially, Human Archive used improvised setups or ready-made installations to record the data. Work is now underway on custom hardware that works together and captures different types of data. More than 50 different devices have already been deployed to collect various data points.

“To capture data, we started with iPhones; then we built our own custom equipment and caps. Now we have more than seven different hardware products that we use interchangeably on different modalities. After collecting data from different devices, we worked on syncing data from all these different sources,” Patel said during a call.

The company said it is developing ways to refine AI models with its own data and test them on robots to evaluate task effectiveness. By doing this, the startup can demonstrate the quality of its data to potential customers and internal models after training.

Zach DeWitt, a partner at Wing VC, said the startup has a unique advantage in collecting data from multiple sensors.

“No one else in the world has been able to synchronize and collect headset RGB-D, force feedback, full-body motion capture, and synchronized chest and wrist camera data at scale. They have been doing internal model training on this data, and every major lab and university is interested in running experiments on it because of the novelty of the sensors and the scale of the new dataset they are releasing soon,” he told TechCrunch.

Data collection in India and expansion plans

Despite rejection from notable players in the home services industry, Human Archive partnered with smaller startups to offer discounted services to customers. When a worker arrives at a home, consumers are given a choice through the app: pay a reduced price in exchange for consent to data collection, or pay full price for an unrecorded visit.

Patel said customers have been happy to choose the former because disputes over service quality are common and video recording can help resolve them.

The company pays employees a base rate of $1 per hour for participating in egocentric data collection. An Economic Times report shows that other companies pay ₹250 to ₹400 per hour (about $2.63 to $4.20). Patel said competitors pay more than Human Archive, but its presence on the ground in India allows it to keep compensation lower.

“The Human Archive network provides immediate, flexible earning opportunities worldwide, lowering the barrier to entry into the AI ​​economy. We see this as a critical bridge that immediately funds livelihoods while building the infrastructure for a safer, more productive future,” said DeWitt.

In addition to wage payments, there are concerns about privacy surrounding the collection of data via video recordings. It is not clear what information Human Archive gives employees about how their images are used. The company said its commercial contracts are in line with those of India Digital Personal Data Protection Act (DPDP).as a privacy policy notice will be displayed along with consent information describing the purpose of the data collection and how it will be processed. The company said all data has been anonymized and faces have been blurred from the recordings. Last week, Money Check reported that 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.

While Human Archive largely collects data in India, it has begun expanding into Southeast Asia and the US. The company is also building a platform where anyone can participate in data collection and make money. It also wants to offer U.S. customers services such as cleaning or cooking in exchange for data collection by participating employees — although these programs are still in early pilot stages.

Several well-funded startups are racing to build physical AI. This requires vast amounts of training data showing people at work – and Human Archive is among the players vying to meet that demand. Whether the approach can scale will depend on the partnerships it forges and the uniqueness and volume of data it can collect to satisfy the appetite of physical AI labs.