In recent years, India online food delivery marketplace has grown significantly, with the IPO of Zomato and Swiggy and an increase in the number of cloud kitchens. Meanwhile, startups working on home services, such as on-demand home staffing platforms like Urban Company, snabbitand SoonThey have gained popularity.
Startup based in Silicon Valley human archive is taking advantage of this trend, partnering with these companies to have workers wear special caps with cameras to collect egocentric (first-person point of view) video data of everyday tasks that could be used to train robots.
Without naming specific partners, the startup said it is working with companies in the home services, shelters and restaurant sectors to collect egocentric data, and says it has more than 1,000 active headsets deployed in multiple locations.
Thanks to that traction, Human Archive said Tuesday that 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 two Berkeley students and two Stanford students: Samay Mani, Rushil Agarwal, Shloke Patel and Raj Patel, the latter two being cousins. All four have research experience spanning robotics, hardware and haptic data.
The founding of the company is a direct bet on where the AI industry is headed. As robotics labs and artificial intelligence 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 everyday work. Human Archive’s bet is that the workers who make up India’s burgeoning informal economy represent a scalable, untapped source of exactly that data.
While Human Archive is working with several partners, the startup said it was turned down for collaboration by many Indian home services companies, including Pronto and Urban Company.
The rejection of the company by the main players became a topic of public debate last weekend, when the Indian media Entrackr reported that Pronto is actively seeking partnerships to collect worker data for robotics training, and that Snabbit had held initial conversations with Human Archive before the project fell through.
Abhiraj Singh Bhal, CEO of the urban company responded at X, stating that the company would not participate in such deals, leading Patel to shoot back that Urban Company would soon be forced to reconsider or risk losing relevance in terms of losing customers. Co-founder Rushil Agarwal was even more forceful, posting that Pronto founder Anjali Sardana had Serious at him and called him “stupid” when he raised the idea of a data association. He soon acknowledged the conversations but said he decided not to pursue them further.
Across the country, other startups are collecting egocentric data from different work environmentsincluding factory floors. To differentiate itself, Human Archive is using and developing additional devices, such as haptic gloves, a full-body motion capture suit, and wrist cameras to capture data including motion and touch force, synchronously aligned with RGB-D (color images paired in real time with depth information), for sale to artificial intelligence labs. The startup believes that video data alone is not enough, but that combining it with other sensor data makes it significantly more valuable.
Raj Patel told TechCrunch that while showing the project to other researchers, they came across egocentric data and wanted to combine video with haptic force data. The founders started talking to different labs and realized that the market for egocentric and sensor-based data was just heating up, and decided to build a company around that.
Initially, Human Archive used improvised setups or available platforms to capture the data. He is now working on custom hardware that works together and captures different types of data. It already has over 50 different devices deployed to collect different data points.
“To capture data, we started with iPhones, then built our own custom rigs and lids. We now have over seven different hardware products that we use interchangeably in different modalities. After collecting data from different devices, we work on synchronizing data from all of these different sources,” he said in a call.
The company said it is developing ways to fine-tune AI models with its own data and test them on robots to evaluate the effectiveness of tasks. By doing this, the startup can demonstrate the quality of its data to potential customers and train internal models later.
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 sync and collect RGB-D data from headsets, force feedback, full-body motion capture, and synchronized data from chest and wrist cameras at scale. They have been training internal models with this data, and all major labs and universities are interested in running experiments with them because of the novelty of the sensors and the scale of the new data set they will be releasing soon,” he told TechCrunch.
Data collection in India and expansion plans.
Despite pushback 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 offered a choice through the app: pay a discounted price in exchange for consenting to data collection, or pay full price for an unregistered visit.
Raj Patel mentioned that customers have been happy to opt for the former, as disputes over service quality are common and video recordings can help resolve them.
The company pays employees a base rate of $1 per hour to participate in egocentric data collection. A report in the Economic Times suggests that other companies pay between 250 and 400 rupees per hour (approximately $2.63 and $4.20). Patel said competitors pay more than Human Archive, but its on-the-ground presence in India allows it to keep compensation lower.
“The Human Archive network offers immediate and flexible income 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 the payment of salaries, there are privacy concerns around data collection through video recordings. It’s unclear what information Human Archive gives workers about how their images are used. The company said its commercial contracts comply with Indian standards. Digital Personal Data Protection Law (DPDP)as it displays a privacy policy notice, along with consent information detailing the purpose of data collection and how it is processed. The company said all data is anonymous., and faces appear blurred in the recordings. Last week, Money Control 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 to expand to Southeast Asia and the US. The company is also building a platform so anyone can participate in data collection and make money. It also wants to offer clients in the United States services such as cleaning or cooking in exchange for data collection by participating workers, although these programs are only in an early pilot stage.
Several well-funded startups are racing build Physical AI. Doing so requires massive amounts of training data showing humans at work, and Human Archive is one of the players competing to meet that demand. Whether your approach can scale will depend on the partnerships you establish and the uniqueness and volume of data you can collect to satisfy the appetite of physical AI labs.
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