Pronto Founder Anjali Sardana Launches Physical AI Venture Provision Labs
Anjali Sardana, founder of instant home services startup Pronto, has launched Provision Labs, a physical AI venture based in San Francisco.
According to its website, Provision Labs will collect data to train and test AI systems designed to perform real-world tasks using robots and other machines.
Sardana will serve as CEO of Provision Labs as well as Pronto. The venture will work with developers building physical AI models. Economic Times first reported the development and said Provision Labs plans to source training data from professionals across sectors globally and help AI developers deploy their models.
The launch comes months after Pronto faced scrutiny over a pilot that recorded household chores to generate training data for physical AI and robotics systems. Entrackr reported that Pronto was exploring the use of footage from household tasks to produce real-world training data for robotics labs. Investor documents the publication reviewed said the startup was building a data business by using its workforce to capture household activities, and had begun piloting real-world training data with leading physical AI labs.
In the pilot, Pronto's service professionals wore cameras while washing dishes, folding laundry, cleaning and preparing meals. Pronto later told Inc42 the pilot was voluntary and open only to customers who opted in while booking a service. It said the pilot covered less than 0.01% of its users at the time.
"Pronto does not, by default, record in customers' homes, nor does it use customer data. We started the pilot you are referring to a few days ago. It is a strictly opt-in feature, available only to customers who actively choose it at the time of booking," the startup said back then.
Newsletter
The corridor, every morning.
Funding rounds and cross-border capital moves, one email, five minutes.
Pronto also said participating customers paid for the feature and could view anonymised footage on the app for 48 hours. It said the footage would not be shared with third-party AI labs and would be deleted from its servers within 48 hours.
In a later social media post, the startup said it had spent months working towards compliance with India's Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act. It argued that real-world behavioural data would be essential to training robots to operate in household environments.
The pilot drew criticism over whether customers fully understood how recordings made inside their homes could be used to develop physical AI systems. Questions also emerged around data storage, processing and the extent to which such footage could be used to build commercial training datasets.
Provision Labs' launch comes amid growing demand for real-world data to train robots to manipulate objects, navigate different environments and perform everyday tasks. Startups are already tapping India's workforce to build these datasets. Y Combinator-backed Human Archive collects recordings of workers performing physical tasks, processes the footage and sells the resulting datasets to frontier AI labs and robotics companies. Awign and Objectways are among others building pipelines that supply first-person footage of human activity to AI developers.
That demand has opened a business opportunity, but it also raises questions about workers' consent and compensation, the privacy of others captured on camera, and how much value Indian data suppliers retain when the resulting models and intellectual property belong to overseas companies.
More in Startup News
