Human Archive Raises $8.2M Seed to Train Robots With Gig Data

Fundraise Insider tracks newly funded startups each week and delivers verified C-suite contacts straight to your inbox, so you reach the right people while the funding is still fresh. See pricing.

Human Archive has raised $8.2 million in a Seed round from Wing Venture Capital, NVP Capital, Y Combinator, and a group of angel investors from frontier AI labs. Wing Venture Capital and NVP Capital led the round, with angel investments from figures at OpenAI, Nvidia, Google, 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 last two being cousins. Based in San Francisco, Human Archive launched earlier this year.

The company develops hardware and mobile systems that collect, label, and synchronize multiple forms of data, including video, audio, sensor readings, and long-duration activity data. Backed by Y Combinator, it taps India’s gig economy, paying workers to wear sensor suites while performing everyday service tasks. The company currently operates more than 1,000 active headset units across India.

The gap it is chasing is a familiar one in robotics. As labs and frontier AI companies race to build machines that can carry out physical tasks, they keep running into a shortage of high-quality training data showing humans doing everyday work. Human Archive collects multimodal data to feed the training of physical AI systems and robots.