Pronto’s Second Shift

by · Inc42

SUMMARY

  • Pronto is turning household chores into physical AI training data, with founder Anjali Sardana also launching San Francisco-based Provision Labs.
  • A growing crop of Indian startups is tapping the country's vast labour pool to collect real-world data for training robots.
  • As investor interest grows, questions around worker compensation, informed consent, privacy and ownership of AI training data remain unresolved.
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Anjali Sardana and Pronto entered India’s domestic services market in 2025 to solve a familiar urban problem: finding reliable house help on demand. The result was a quick commerce-style home services platform, combining technology-led recruitment, standardised training and a hyperlocal network of professionals. 

Pronto, which competes with Snabbit and Urban Company, says it has served more than half a million households across 11 cities. But the real story of Pronto is being developed far away from the homes and houses that its professionals visit. 

This is being built in Silicon Valley.

Footage recorded by professionals working in thousands of homes every day is helping shape the next generation of robots. 

The first signs of this ambition emerged in May 2026, when Pronto was reported to be exploring ways to generate physical AI training data using footage captured during household chores. And since then Sardana and Pronto’s ambitions have solidified. 

In July, Pronto formalised the experiment through Verified, an opt-in premium service in which housekeepers and cleaners wear head-mounted or body-mounted cameras during visits.

In October 2026, Sardana set up Provision Labs, a physical AI venture based in San Francisco, which will collect data to train and test AI systems designed to perform real-world tasks using robots and other machines. It will work with developers building physical AI models. 

A few days later, Provision Labs announced that it is acquiring Mumbai-based Basilisk Industries, a 2023-founded company focused on perception technologies, which help machines interpret their surroundings. 

Basilisk founder Shourya Watwani will lead Provision’s hardware efforts and work on its in-house post-processing models. Watwani and his team are said to have developed a 3D hand-tracking model and built the first version of a lightweight tactile glove to capture touch-related data. 

Given this timeline, the fact that Pronto doubled-down on its experiment after the May 2026 introduction does not seem surprising at all. 

The relationship between Pronto’s household data collection and Provision Labs’ operations, however, remains unclear. Inc42 asked Pronto how the two businesses work together, if at all, but the company declined to comment.

The unanswered question is significant: could a network originally built to deliver household services become an acquisition channel for the data needed to train global robotics systems?

Why Record Workers?

The first reports around Pronto’s collection of worker data triggered a backlash over surveillance and privacy of house help professionals. 

To assuage some of the critics, Pronto said that customers are informed about the terms several times before recording begins, while personally identifiable information is automatically blurred or removed on the device.

“The raw footage is deleted immediately after the work is done, and no one ever accesses it. For 48 hours, an anonymised, end-to-end encrypted recording is available only to the customer, who can watch it in the app to check the work. After that, we use the anonymised footage for AI training, as our terms set out,” the company told Inc42.

Pronto said more than half of the professionals participating in Verified already earn over ₹40,000 a month. The company claims workers feel safer knowing there is a record of their work, but no independent studies have been conducted to validate these claims.