Startup bets India’s gig workforce can train global robots

India’s online food delivery sector has expanded rapidly in recent years, marked by the public listings of Zomato and Swiggy and a surge in cloud kitchens. Concurrently, on-demand home service startups like Urban Company, Snabbit, and Pronto have seen rising popularity.

San Francisco-based startup Human Archive is capitalizing on this growth by partnering with these firms to equip workers with camera-equipped headsets. This setup captures egocentric (first-person) video data of routine tasks, which can be used to train robots.

While declining to name specific partners, the startup confirmed it is collaborating with firms in home services, hostels, and restaurants to gather egocentric data. It reports having over 1,000 active headsets deployed across various locations.

Building on this momentum, Human Archive announced Tuesday that it has secured $8.2 million in funding from Wing Venture Capital, NVP Capital, Y Combinator, and angel investors from OpenAI, Nvidia, Google, Mercor, AfterQuery, BAIR, SAIL, Brad Boa, and Meta.

The company was established by four students from Berkeley and Stanford: Samay Mani, Rushil Agarwal, Shloke Patel, and Raj Patel (the latter two are cousins). All four possess research experience in robotics, hardware, and tactile data.

The company’s launch reflects a strategic bet on the AI industry’s trajectory. As robotics labs and leading AI firms race to create machines capable of performing physical tasks, they face a significant hurdle: a lack of high-quality, real-world training data showing humans performing everyday work. Human Archive’s strategy relies on the premise that workers in India’s booming gig economy offer an untapped, scalable source of this critical data.

Although Human Archive collaborates with several partners, the startup disclosed that it was rejected by major Indian home service firms, including Pronto and Urban Company, for potential collaborations.

This rejection became public last weekend when Indian outlet Entrackr reported that Pronto is actively seeking partnerships to collect worker data for robotics training, and that Snabbit had held preliminary discussions with Human Archive before the project was abandoned.

Urban Company CEO Abhiraj Singh Bhal responded on X, stating the company would not participate in such arrangements. Patel countered that Urban Company might soon need to reconsider or risk losing relevance due to customer churn. Co-founder Rushil Agarwal was more direct, posting that Pronto founder Anjali Sardana had dismissed his proposal as “stupid.” Pronto acknowledged the discussions but stated it decided not to proceed.

Other startups across the country are also gathering egocentric data from various work environments, including factories. To stand out, Human Archive is using and developing additional devices, such as tactile gloves, a full-body motion capture suit, and wrist cameras. These tools capture motion and tactile force data, synchronously aligned with RGB-D (color imagery paired with depth information), which is sold to AI labs. The startup argues that video data alone is insufficient, but combining it with other sensor data significantly increases its value.

Raj Patel told TechCrunch that while presenting the project to other researchers, they encountered egocentric data and sought to combine video with tactile force data. The founders engaged with various labs and realized the market for egocentric and sensor-based data was growing, leading them to build a company around this opportunity.

Initially, Human Archive used makeshift setups or off-the-shelf rigs to capture data. Now, it is developing custom hardware that works together to capture various data types. It currently has over 50 different devices deployed to collect diverse data points.

“To capture data, we started with iPhones, then we built our own custom rigs and caps. Now we have more than seven different hardware products that we use interchangeably across different modalities. After data collection from different devices, we worked on synchronizing data from all these different sources,” he said in a call.

The company is developing methods to fine-tune AI models using its data and testing them on robots to assess task effectiveness. This approach allows the startup to demonstrate data quality to potential customers and post-train internal models.

Zach DeWitt, a partner at Wing VC, stated that 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’ve been doing internal model training on this data, and every major lab and university is interested in running experiments on it due to the novelty of the sensors and the scale of the new dataset they are releasing soon,” he told TechCrunch.

Collecting data in India and expansion plans

Despite rejections from major home service players, Human Archive partnered with smaller startups to offer discounted services. When a worker arrives at a home, customers can choose through the app: pay a discounted price in exchange for consenting to data collection, or pay the full price for an unrecorded visit.

Raj Patel noted that customers have been willing to opt for the discounted service, as disputes over service quality are common, and video recordings can help resolve them.

The company pays workers a base rate of $1 per hour for participating in egocentric data collection. A report from the Economic Times suggests that other companies pay ₹250–₹400 per hour (approximately $2.63–$4.20). Patel stated that competitors pay more than Human Archive, but its on-the-ground presence in India allows it to maintain lower compensation.

“Human Archive’s network provides immediate, flexible earning opportunities globally, lowering the barrier to participating in the AI economy. We see this as a critical bridge that funds immediate livelihoods while building the infrastructure for a safer, more productive future,” DeWitt said.

Beyond wage payments, there are privacy concerns regarding data collection via video recording. It remains unclear what information Human Archive provides to workers about how their footage is used. The company stated that its commercial contracts comply with India’s Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act, displaying a privacy policy notice along with consent information detailing the purpose of data collection and processing. The company claims all data is anonymized, with faces blurred in recordings. Last week, Moneycontrol reported that India’s Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology is investigating the consent mechanisms and data collection practices of startups collecting egocentric data through home service workers.

While Human Archive primarily collects data in India, it has begun expanding into Southeast Asia and the U.S. The company is also building a platform for anyone to participate in data collection and earn money. It aims to offer U.S. customers services like cleaning or cooking in exchange for data collection by participating workers, though these programs are in early pilot stages.

Multiple well-funded startups are racing to develop physical AI. This requires massive amounts of training data showing humans at work, and Human Archive is one of the players competing to meet this demand. The scalability of its approach will depend on the partnerships it forms and the uniqueness and volume of data it can collect to satisfy the needs of physical AI labs.