Pronto Founder’s Provision Labs Acquires Hardware Startup Basilisk Industries

Pronto founder Anjali Sardana’s physical AI venture Provision Labs 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 acquisition. 

Founded by Watwani in 2023, Basilisk focused on perception technologies, which help machines interpret their surroundings. 

According to Sardana, Watwani and his team have already developed a 3D hand-tracking model, redesigned Provision’s perception hardware, and built the first version of a lightweight tactile glove to capture touch-related data. 

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

Building Physical AI Infrastructure

Sardana recently launched San Francisco-based Provision Labs to collect data for training and testing physical AI systems — AI designed to perform real-world tasks through robots and other machines.

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

Provision’s launch followed scrutiny of Pronto’s household recording pilot, which involved service professionals wearing cameras while performing tasks such as cleaning, washing dishes, and folding laundry.

The use of footage captured inside customers’ homes to generate training data for physical AI and robotics systems raised questions about privacy, consent, and data storage.

Pronto maintained that 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.

Among its competitors, Snabbit said it had conducted a one-time simulation test at a training centre with data collection startup Human Archive. Urban Company said it had never recorded inside customers’ homes and had no plans to do so. 

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