Pronto, a Bengaluru-based home services startup, has been sending camera-equipped workers into customers’ homes to collect footage for training physical AI and robotics systems. The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) has taken cognisance of the matter and is looking into it, government sources told Moneycontrol. Competitor Snabbit has since confirmed it signed a mutual Non Disclosure Agreement (NDA) with robotics data startup Human Archive over similar discussions, suggesting the practice extends beyond Pronto.

What the investor memo revealed: An internal memo from Glade Brook Capital, one of Pronto’s investors, states that the company is “seeking to formalise India’s vast informal labor markets and, in the process generate data to help train physical AI and robotics.” It further says that Pronto is already “piloting real-world training data with leading physical AI labs” and is “developing a data business leveraging its workforce to capture real-world household data for robotics labs.”

The memo adds that early partnership interest has been “encouraging” and that the company is “moving quickly to commercialize the strategy.” The memo was first reported by Entrackr.

How the pilot works

• A worker carries a small outward-facing camera during the job
• The customer receives the footage afterward
• The program is strictly opt-in and chosen by the customer at the time of booking, on a job-by-job basis
• Consent must be reaffirmed before each booking and is not permanent
• The pilot currently covers approximately 0.1% of customers

What Pronto says about privacy safeguards

• Faces and identifying details are blurred automatically
• No personally identifiable information is uploaded or shared
• All footage is deleted within 48 hours
• No human other than the customer can access or review the footage

Pronto’s full blog post, published on May 22, also states:

• The company has been “thinking about this since inception“
• Data collection is framed as a way to increase worker earnings
• The company “worked for months to ensure we go above and beyond what we’re required to do by the law”
• “We are not the only company in the space doing this”

What Snabbit said: Snabbit, a direct competitor confirmed to Entrackr that Human Archive approached the company earlier this year. Snabbit and Human Archive both confirmed that they signed a mutual NDA before discussions began.

“There was no pilot, no customer-home rollout, no operational deployment, and no transfer of customer-home footage or service data,” Snabbit told Entrackr.

The existence of a signed NDA suggests the discussions had moved beyond casual conversations into areas involving confidential commercial or technical information, despite both companies describing the engagement as exploratory. Neither answered questions about what data, if any, was generated during the assessment.

What Human Archive’s Raj Patel claimed: Human Archive co-founder Raj Patel posted on X claiming Urban Company would be “forced to change your mind soon or Urban Company will no longer exist” as competitors offering subsidised-for-recording services grow. “Everyone told us to fuck off. So we did it ourselves,” Patel said, referring to home services companies that declined Human Archive’s approach.

Key claims from his post:

• Human Archive worked with a smaller, unnamed Indian platform that gave users the option to be recorded in exchange for a cheaper price
• 98% of users chose the subsidised option and consented to being recorded
• Bookings grew from 48 to 1,315 per day in two weeks during the exercise
• Recording took place across 15 cities: Patna, Purnia, Darbhanga, Guwahati, Jhanjharpur, Jabalpur, Indore, Siliguri, Mussoorie, Delhi, Gurgaon, Faridabad, Dimapur, Mumbai, and Jaipur
• Human Archive is “working with some of the largest ops businesses in Asia” and workers will soon wear not just cameras but gloves and full-body motion-capture gear
• Human Archive plans to launch next week, making paid-to-record services available “not only in India, but across the world”

What Human Archive said: “Back in January I spoke to Anjali Sardana from Pronto, she laughed at me and basically called me stupid for doing this,” said Human Archive founder Rushil Agarwal, adding: “Look at them now. Iwk props for catching onto the trend.”

Human Archive is a US-based, YC-backed robotics data startup that collects human behaviour datasets for training AI systems.

• It collects footage of human movement, hand actions, and real-world household interactions
• It deploys custom hardware in residential and manufacturing settings
• It sells annotated datasets to frontier robotics labs and physical AI companies

What Urban Company said: Urban Company co-founder and CEO Abhiraj Singh Bhal posted on X:

“In light of recent reports regarding recordings inside customers’ homes by one of our competitors, many people have asked whether @urbancompany_UC engages in anything similar, or intends to do so in the future. The answer is clear and unequivocal: we do not. We are in the business of trust, and we take customer trust and privacy extremely seriously. We do not engage in any such activities, have never done so in the past, and have no plans to do so in the future. Our customers’ privacy is paramount to us, and we remain fully committed to upholding the highest standards of confidentiality, safety, and trust.”

The account restriction allegation: Aditi Shrivastava, co-founder of The Arc and former Stellaris VP, alleged that Pronto restricted her account after she raised privacy concerns. A screenshot she posted showed the message: “Your account is restricted, please reach out to [email protected].” Her response: “Dear Pronto. Nothing says ‘we respect privacy concerns’ like restricting accounts raising them… Well done.” Shrivastava had earlier called the practice “scary” and said she was “suddenly feeling relieved that Pronto cancelled my booking last min.”

What is Pronto: Pronto sends trained, background-verified workers to customers’ homes for everyday chores: mopping, utensil cleaning, laundry, and cooking assistance, promising dispatch within 10 minutes. The startup was founded in April 2025 by Anjali Sardana.

• Total funding: around $40 million, including a $25 million Series B led by Epiq Capital
• Valuation: $100 million, more than eight times its valuation at stealth launch in May 2025
• Investors: Glade Brook Capital, General Catalyst, and Bain Capital Ventures
• Scale: 18,000 bookings a day across 10 cities including Delhi NCR, Bengaluru, and Mumbai

What is physical AI: Physical AI refers to AI systems built to operate in the real world: robots that fold laundry, wash dishes, or navigate kitchens.

Large language models like ChatGPT learned from text scraped off the internet. Physical AI cannot learn from text. It needs first-person video of real people performing real tasks in real environments: hands washing dishes, arms folding clothes, and bodies moving through actual homes.

That data does not exist at scale on the internet. Labs must physically collect it inside real homes. A home services startup whose workers already enter thousands of homes to perform exactly these tasks is therefore extraordinarily valuable to physical AI labs.

Pronto gives labs something no synthetic dataset can replicate: legitimate, recurring access to the inside of people’s homes at scale.

Also Read:

• How DPDP Rules Affect AI Models Collecting, Retaining Data
• Indian Govt to Collect Non-Personal Data for Training AI Models
• DPDP Rules: Platforms Need Parental Consent to Use Children’s Data