Bengaluru-based home services startup Pronto has doubled down on its controversial Verified service, which enables workers to wear cameras while cleaning customers' homes with opt-in consent. According to reports from Mint, the service was initially piloted in May and sparked debate over privacy concerns, with critics questioning whether recording inside private homes with consent went too far. However, founder Anjali Sardana stated that the physical AI data business and home services are highly synergistic, with the company expecting Verified to account for roughly 90% of revenue over the next five years at a gross margin of around 50%. As Forbes reports, Sardana emphasizes that "Trillions of dollars are going into AI capex every year. All the money in the world is getting invested in AI, but your blue-collar worker in India is not capturing any of that."
The service has shown significant growth momentum since its initial launch. As reported by Mint, Verified orders increased from 15 per day two weeks ago to approximately 700 orders currently, with the company executing about 50,000 orders daily. The startup currently operates 130 head-mounted devices across Bengaluru and the National Capital Region, with plans to expand to 1,300 devices by August. Verified is priced the same as standard services, with most bookings costing ₹59 for 30 minutes and ₹99 for an hour, while workers receive significantly higher payouts with 2x standard rates for 1-hour bookings and up to 3x for 2-hour bookings. According to Forbes, customers pay ₹49-249 rupees per hour, making it difficult for cost-efficient robots to compete with human workers in the short term.
According to Mint reports, Pronto's Verified service currently generates margins between 20-70%, primarily due to cloud computing costs. Founder Anjali Sardana expects margins to stabilize around 50-60% within the next month or two. The company's approach involves keeping data free of personally identifiable information and processing it on graphic processing units (GPUs) without human intervention, which drives up costs. To address this, Pronto is hiring machine learning and reinforcement learning engineers to improve data set processing efficiency and cost-effectiveness. As Forbes reports, Bain Capital Ventures partner Ajay Agarwal notes that "Demand for Pronto's video footage has exploded in the past 12 months as robotics becomes the new hot category in AI."
As reported by Mint, Pronto is the first home services startup to make physical AI data collection part of its business model, though it's not the first company overall to do so. Unlike most physical AI collection services, Pronto plans to collect, annotate, and sell data in-house rather than selling to third parties. The company received $45 million in Series B funding at a $200 million valuation, with investor Lachy Groom writing a $20 million check. While rivals Urban Company and Snabbit have declined to record in consumers' homes, US-based startup Shift offers free cleaning in exchange for worker recordings. According to Forbes, the most immediate application for Pronto's data is building a general-purpose home robot that can do much of what the human house help does today. Pronto is part of India's booming quick commerce industry, which has birthed successful startups like Blinkit that brought in about $3.9 billion in revenue in FY2026.
According to Mint reports, the physical AI data collection market is viewed as the next big tech frontier, with India's large population of gig workers providing an untapped source of first-person centric data. Amit Khanna from Grant Thornton Bharat noted that companies are seeking data about the physical side of human life to create solutions impacting them, with this market being multiple times larger than the digital market. However, industry experts warn that scaling responsibly in home services will be challenging, as variables cannot be managed and controlled as effectively as in industrial settings, requiring companies to redesign operating models to protect privacy rights. As Forbes reports, "Today, more than 50 million people across India work as domestic help," but the industry faces challenges with "unorganized, chaotic conditions where everyone loses."
