Privacy row aside, Pronto bets big on robot-trainer camera biz

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Bengaluru, July 30 -- A service pitched as a way to build trust instead had sparked a debate over privacy. In May, when Bengaluru-based home services startup Pronto piloted an optional service in which workers wear cameras while cleaning customers' homes, critics questioned whether recording inside private homes, even if with consent, went too far.Nonetheless, Pronto has doubled down on scaling Verified, the opt-in service that enables physical AI data collection, which it says has "anonymized" footage that trains artificial intelligence (AI) systems for robotics. The quick home services platform now bets that the service will account for a chunk of its revenue over the next five years, founder Anjali Sardana said."The physical AI data business and our home services business are not two different verticals. It's one. They're highly synergistic in that our services provide the raw material for the data business," said Sardana in an interview to Mint.To be sure, the home services startup isn't the first one to make physical AI data collection part of its business, it's only the first in its sector. Unlike most physical AI collection services, Pronto does not plan to sell the data to a third party to clean up; it will go in for in-house data collection, annotate and sell directly."Our margin on Verified currently swings between 20-70%, primarily because of cloud computing costs. We're expecting that to stabilize in a month or two to around 50-60%," said Sardana.The founder said that due to Pronto's aim to keep its data free of personally identifiable information and privacy concerns, all data post processing is largely done on graphic processing units (GPUs), without human intervention, which is driving costs up.That is also the reason the firm is hiring machine learning and reinforcement learning engineers and data scientists to help make data set processing more efficient and cost-effective.Over the next five years, Pronto expects its data business to account for roughly 90% of its revenue, at a gross margin of around 50%. The firm was set up last March and is yet to file its earnings.Verified puts Pronto into the sparse, but competitive, physical AI data collection race. With AI in robotics being viewed as the next big tech frontier, labs find there are not enough datasets to train physical intelligence models. This has triggered a race to collect data or...

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