Maxinsights has raised $30 million in seed funding to expand its physical AI data platform, which pays people to record everyday activities such as cooking, cleaning and other work to generate training data for robots and AI models.
The company was founded by robotics and autonomous-driving veterans, with its wider engineering team including former employees of Waymo, Google, Microsoft and Meta.
The funding round was led by PeakXV, with participation from Tola Capital, South Park Commons, INCE Capital and Alumni Ventures.
Maxinsights has also launched MaxLoop, an AI-based system for monitoring and improving the quality of collected footage, and MaxGlove, a sensor glove designed to capture tactile information such as grip force and object weight that cannot be obtained from video alone.
The company says it has captured more than 2 million hours of real-world human activity, of which 1.5 million hours is model-ready, and serves more than 30 customers, including AI labs and foundation model developers.
More than 5,000 contractors across six countries use Maxinsights’ camera hardware to record themselves carrying out everyday activities, ranging from loading dishwashers and preparing food to washing cars.
Unlike staged data collection, the approach is intended to expose AI models to the variation and unexpected events encountered in real homes and workplaces.
Yuguang (YG) Yuan, founder and CEO of Maxinsights, said: “We built the whole pipeline ourselves, from the hand-tracking models to the platform that scores every operator’s footage as it arrives, because nobody was going to sell us the pieces that make messy real-world data usable.
“Robots get deployed into real kitchens, not staged ones, and something unexpected happens every few minutes. Edge cases are the job, and the only way to get them is to record real work in real homes. Collecting one great hour of data is easy, and holding quality across millions of hours and thousands of people is what we built the company to do.”
Adding touch to robot training data
MaxLoop automatically assesses incoming footage and provides feedback to operators. Maxinsights says the system has reduced review costs by approximately 80 percent and enables it to process 450,000 hours of footage a month.
MaxGlove, meanwhile, is being developed with Genesis AI to capture force and touch information, including pressure, resistance and slip.
Maxinsights is targeting 1 million hours of force data in 2027 using the glove and its existing collection network.
The company says all 200,000 hours of egocentric data used to train Genesis AI’s GENE-26.5 model came from Maxinsights. It also says it is the largest data provider behind Dyna Robotics’ Dyna-2 World-Action Model.
Rohit Agarwal, managing director of Peak XV, said: “Almost every company in this category is selling hours. Maxinsights is the only one that treated quality control as an engineering problem rather than a staffing cost, which is what lets them operate in real life.
“That decision is hard to copy after the fact, and it’s why the labs that tried other vendors keep coming back to them.”
Johnson Wang, cofounder of Genesis AI, said: “Robots need to learn from the complexity and variation of everyday life, and carefully controlled datasets alone cannot capture that.
“With Genesis 26.5, we focused on footage of people performing everyday tasks naturally, with much of that data provided by Maxinsights, to help our models learn from a broader range of real-world situations”
Yuan previously co-founded industrial robotics company Mega Gear Robotics, which was acquired, while Maxinsights co-founder and CTO Kun Wang was an early engineer at Google X/Waymo and later co-founded autonomous driving company QCraft.
