This startup is betting India's gig economy can train the world's robots | TechCrunch
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Image Credits: Human Archive
AI
This startup is betting India’s gig economy can train the world’s robots
Ivan Mehta
9:00 AM PDT · May 26, 2026
In the last few years, India’s online food delivery market has grown significantly, with both Zomato and Swiggy going public and the number of cloud kitchens increasing. Meanwhile, startups working on home services, such as on-demand household staffing platforms like Urban Company, Snabbit, and Pronto, have gained popularity.
Silicon Valley-based startup Human Archive is tapping into 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, hotel, and restaurant sectors to collect egocentric data, and it says it has more than 1,000 active headsets deployed 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 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 spanning robotics, hardware, and tactile data.
The company’s founding is a direct bet on where the AI industry is heading. As robotics labs and frontier AI companies race 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 showing humans doing everyday work. Human Archive’s bet is that the workers staffing India’s booming gig economy represent an untapped and scalable source of exactly that data.
While Human Archive is working with multiple partners, the startup said it was rejected by many Indian home services companies, including Pronto and Urban Company, for a collaboration.
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 worker data for robotics training and that Snabbit had held early discussions with Human Archive before the project fell apart.
Urban Company CEO Abhiraj Singh Bhal responded on X, stating the company would not engage in such arrangements — prompting Patel to fire back that Urban Company would soon be forced to reconsider or risk losing relevance to customer churn. Co-founder Rushil Agarwal was blunter still, posting that Pronto founder Anjali Sardana had laughed at him and called him "stupid" when he raised the idea of a data partnership. Pronto acknowledged the conversations but said it chose not to move forward.
Across the country, other startups are collecting egocentric data from different work environments, including 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 (color imagery paired in real time with depth information), to sell to AI labs. The startup believes that video data alone is not sufficient but that pairing it with other sensor data makes it much more valuable.
Initially, Human Archive used makeshift setups or off-the-shelf rigs to capture the data. Now it is working on custom hardware that works together and captures different kinds of data. It already has more than 50 different devices deployed to collect different 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," Patel said in a call.
The company said it...