Provision Labs acquires Basilisk Industries, hardware startup

Provision Labs, the physical AI venture of Pronto founder Anjali Sardana, has acquired Mumbai-based hardware startup Basilisk Industries for an undisclosed sum.

Basilisk founder Shourya Watwani will lead Provision’s hardware efforts and work on its in-house post-processing models, Sardana said in a LinkedIn post announcing the deal. Watwani and his team are joining Provision.

Provision is also expanding its engineering and research teams across San Francisco, Toronto and Bengaluru. It is hiring for computer vision, perception and tactile data, environment reconstruction, and hardware.

Provision Labs is a San Francisco-based startup that collects data for training and testing physical AI systems. Physical AI refers to AI designed to perform real-world tasks through robots and other machines.

The company plans to source training data from professionals across sectors globally, to help developers deploy their physical AI models. Sardana is CEO of both Provision and Pronto.

Basilisk, founded by Watwani in 2023, focused on perception technologies, which help machines interpret their surroundings. According to Sardana, the team has already built a 3D hand-tracking model, redesigned Provision’s perception hardware, and developed the first version of a lightweight tactile glove that captures touch-related data.

Provision’s launch followed scrutiny of Pronto’s household recording pilot, in which service professionals wore cameras while cleaning, washing dishes and folding laundry. The use of footage captured inside customers’ homes as training data raised questions about privacy, consent and data storage.

Pronto said customers had to opt in while booking and that the pilot covered less than 0.01% of its users. It also said the pilot complied with India’s Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act and that the footage would not be shared with third-party AI labs.