This startup is betting that the Indian economy is capable of training the world’s robots

In the last few years, the online food delivery market in India has grown significantly, with Zomato and Swiggy going public and an increase in the number of cloud kitchens. Meanwhile, home services startups, such as on-demand home staffing platforms including Urban Company, Snapbit, and Pronto, have gained popularity.

Silicon Valley startup Human Archive is exploiting this trend, partnering with these companies to have workers wear special hats equipped with cameras to collect selfish video data (a first-person view) 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, lodging and restaurant sectors to collect selfish data, and says it has more than 1,000 active headsets spread across multiple locations.

On the back of 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 two Berkeley students and two Stanford students — Samay Mani, Rochelle Agarwal, Shlok Patel, and Raj Patel, the latter two cousins. All four have research backgrounds including robotics, hardware, and haptic data.

Founding the company is a direct bet on where the AI ​​industry is headed. As leading robotics labs and AI companies race to build machines that can perform real-world physical tasks, they face a critical bottleneck — a lack of real-world, high-quality training data showing humans performing everyday actions. Human Archive’s bet is that workers in India’s booming gig economy represent an untapped, scalable source of exactly that data.

While Human Archive is working with multiple partners, the startup said it has been rejected by several Indian home services companies, including Pronto and Urban Company, to collaborate.

The company’s rejection by major players became a public topic last weekend, when Indian outlet Entrackr reported that Pronto was actively seeking partnerships to collect worker data for robotics training, and that Snapbit had held early discussions with the Human Archive before the project collapsed.

Urban Company CEO Abhiraj Singh Bhal responded to Co-founder Rochelle Agarwal was more blunt, posting that Pronto founder Anjali Sardana mocked him and called him “stupid” when he raised the idea of ​​a data partnership. Pronto acknowledged the talks but said it chose not to go ahead.

Across the country, other startups are collecting selfish data from various work environments, including factory floors. To differentiate itself, the Human Archive is using and developing additional hardware, such as haptic gloves, a full-body motion capture suit, and wrist cameras to capture data including motion and the force of touch, synchronously compatible with RGB-D (color images paired in real-time with depth information), to sell to AI labs. The startup believes that video data alone is not enough, but linking it with other sensor data makes it significantly more valuable.

Raj Patel told TechCrunch that while pitching the project to other researchers, they came across egocentric data and wanted to combine video with force-haptic data. The founders started talking to different labs and realized that the market for selfish, sensor-driven data was heating up, and decided to build a company around that.

Initially, Human Archive used temporary setups or off-the-shelf devices to capture data. It now runs on dedicated hardware that works together and captures different types of data. It already has more than 50 different devices deployed to collect different data points.

“To capture the data, we started using iPhones, and then we built our own custom rigs and covers. Now we have more than seven different hardware products that we use interchangeably in different ways. After collecting data from different devices, we worked to synchronize the data from all these different sources,” he said in a phone call.

The company said it is developing ways to fine-tune artificial intelligence models with its own data and test them on robots to evaluate the effectiveness of tasks. By doing this, the startup can prove the quality of its data to potential clients and internal models after training.

Zach DeWitt, 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 headphone 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 experimenting with it given the novelty of the sensors and the size of the new dataset they will soon be releasing,” he told TechCrunch.

Data collection in India and expansion plans

Despite pushback from major players in the home services industry, Human Archive has teamed up with smaller startups to offer discounted services to customers. When the worker arrives home, consumers are given a choice through the app: pay a discounted price in exchange for consenting to data collection, or pay the full price for an unregistered visit.

Raj Patel mentioned that customers were happy to choose the first option, 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 to participate in selfish data collection. A report by the Economic Times indicates that other companies pay 250 to 400 Indian rupees 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 and flexible earning opportunities globally, lowering the barrier to participation in the AI ​​economy,” DeWitt said. “We see this as a critical bridge that funds direct livelihoods while building the infrastructure for a safer, more productive future.”

Beyond paying wages, there are privacy concerns around data collection via video recording. It’s not clear what information Human Archive provides to workers about how their footage is used. The company said its commercial contracts are compliant 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 how it will be processed. The company said that all data is anonymous, The faces are blurred from the recordings. Last week, Moneycontrol reported that India’s Ministry of Electronics and IT is looking into consent mechanisms and data collection practices of startups that selfishly collect data through domestic helpers.

While Human Archive collects data largely in India, it has begun expanding into Southeast Asia and the United States. The company is also building a platform for anyone to engage in data collection and make money. It also wants to offer customers in the US services such as cleaning or cooking in exchange for data collection by participating workers – although such programs are still in early beta.

Several well-funded startups are racing to build physical AI. Doing so requires vast amounts of training data showing humans in action, and Human Archive is one of the players vying to serve this demand. Whether its approach can scale will depend on the partnerships it forges, and the uniqueness and volume of data it can collect to satisfy the physical appetites of AI labs.