Robots can learn from demonstrations, but gathering enough examples of people handling objects in ordinary environments has become a substantial business in its own right. Santa Clara-based Maxinsights has raised $30 million in seed funding to expand its supply of human activity data for robotics foundation models, with Peak XV leading the round. Tola Capital, South Park Commons, INCE Capital and Alumni Ventures also participated.
Maxinsights pays people to wear cameras while performing everyday work in homes, restaurants and other settings. Its network now includes more than 5,000 contractors across six countries, according to the company, and has collected over two million hours of first-person video. Approximately 1.5 million hours are described as ready for model training. The company says it serves more than 30 customers, including eight on recurring contracts.
Those customers include two robotics AI developers. Maxinsights says it supplied the first-person video used in training Genesis AI’s GENE-26.5 model and is the largest data provider for Dyna Robotics’ Dyna-2. The relationships put its data collection operation inside the development process for models intended to transfer knowledge of human movement and manipulation to machines. The companies have not published an independent audit of the reported dataset volumes.
Alongside the financing, Maxinsights introduced MaxLoop, software that checks incoming footage for capture quality and usable task information. The company says the system has cut review costs by roughly 80% and allows it to process 450,000 hours monthly. It also introduced MaxGlove, a tactile data collection device being developed with Genesis AI to capture forces and contact information that video cannot directly measure. Maxinsights is targeting one million hours of force data in 2027.
The round comes as robotics developers look for larger and more varied training datasets without relying exclusively on costly robot-operated demonstrations. Maxinsights has disclosed neither its valuation nor revenue, and its collection and processing figures remain company-reported.
