For robotics teams buying data
Mercor and Scale AI Alternatives for Robotics Data
Teams moving their robotics data operations compare these 34 providers, grouped by the service they run. Each line is the company's own description of what it sells for robotics, or reporting on it, linked to the source; the dataset was last reviewed on 28 Oct 2026.
Teleoperation and robot demonstrations
Operators who drive your robots or rigs to record demonstrations.
Centific
Centific sells HumanoidIQ, a robotics data product of real-world robot and human demonstrations, quality-checked episode by episode and ready to license.
Centific's OneForma crowd platform said it is working with at least five customers on egocentric data collection across twenty-five countries (July 2026).
Source: Centific (company site), OneForma Community (Centific)
PrismaX
PrismaX sells robotics data (teleoperation and egocentric episodes) to physical AI builders and pays operators through its VLA Foundry program to capture the real world.
Source: PrismaX (company site)
Sensei Robotics
Sensei builds and runs a network of trained contractors (Senseis) who get task descriptions from robotics researchers and engineers and are paid to record demonstrations that fulfil them.
TSMG
TSMG staffs on-site contract Robot Teleoperators (for example in Milpitas, California) who operate robots through teleoperation consoles and capture operational data for client robotics and AI programs.
Source: TSMG (Lever job board)
First-person (egocentric) video capture
People who film everyday tasks from their own point of view, at home or at work.
Appen
Appen sells egocentric data collection for robots and embodied systems: stereo first-person capture with synchronized wrist pose and gripper state, alongside robotics demonstration, sensor fusion, LiDAR and autonomous vehicle data, captured in its own controlled kitchen, workshop, assembly and logistics facilities.
Source: Appen
Build AI
Build AI calls itself the data hyperscaler for physical AI: it makes its own capture hardware and runs collection of egocentric video of physical labor, and offers labs an off-the-shelf dataset with quality guarantees.
Source: Build AI (company site)
Cortex AI
Cortex AI, listed in Y Combinator's company directory, says it builds a large-scale real-world workplace robot and egocentric dataset for embodied AI.
Ai2 said it curated its MolmoAct 2-Bimanual YAM robot demonstration dataset (about 700 hours) with support from Cortex AI, and retained Cortex AI to run a third-party benchmark of MolmoAct 2.
Source: Y Combinator (company directory), Ai2
Defined.ai
Defined.ai lists an egocentric video dataset of head-mounted ultrawide recordings of everyday household tasks for robotics and embodied AI training.
Source: Defined.ai (company site)
Digital Divide Data
Digital Divide Data licenses an egocentric dataset of stereo video with synchronized head and hand pose and VLA-ready annotations from real human manipulation tasks.
Egolab.AI
Egolab.AI, founded in January 2026 by two teenagers in Maharashtra, calls itself India's largest first-person POV data aggregator, recording factory workers with head-mounted devices for robotics companies.
Source: Scroll.in
Human Archive
Human Archive said it has more than 1,000 active headsets deployed across multiple locations, collecting egocentric data with companies in the home services, hotel and restaurant sectors.
Source: TechCrunch
Innodata
Innodata sells real-world training data for robotics, VLA models, world models, wearables and embodied AI, including egocentric video labeling.
Source: Innodata (company site)
Objectways
Objectways sells egocentric and teleoperation data collection services and embodied AI datasets for training robots.
Source: Objectways
Pangeanic
Pangeanic sells egocentric video datasets for physical AI: more than 6,500 hours of identified inventory growing weekly, plus access to more than 20,000 hours through supply agreements.
Source: Pangeanic (company site)
Perle
Recruits egocentric video contributors (phone on a headstrap, at home and at work) to build data that teaches AI and robotics how people move; postings cover the US, Canada and Latin America, Egypt, and Indonesia and Malaysia; pay is per hour of accepted footage, varying by region.
Source: Perle (job posting on Rippling)
Prolific
Offers commissioned embodied-AI training data from its participant pool: egocentric video, manipulation task recordings and and physical scene annotation.
Says it is trusted by more than 100 robotics and physical AI research teams.
Source: Prolific (company site)
Shaip
Shaip says it scaled a single ongoing Physical AI data collection program for a humanoid robotics developer to 5,000 valid hours of egocentric VR motion capture per month.
Source: Shaip (press release)
Toloka
Toloka released HomER (Home Egocentric Robotics), an open-source dataset of head-mounted egocentric videos of household tasks for robotics training, built on its self-service platform, covering 17 task categories and published on Hugging Face.
Source: Toloka
Annotation and labelling of robot data
Teams that label robot, sensor and video data.
Claru
Claru, the training-data platform of Reka AI, runs capture infrastructure, enrichment pipelines and an annotation workforce to deliver datasets for robotics and physical AI (egocentric video, robotics trajectories, world-model footage).
Source: Claru (company site)
Labelbox
Labelbox sells robotics data from pre-training to evaluation: egocentric and teleoperated demonstrations captured on purpose-built rigs from seven synchronized viewpoints.
Source: Labelbox (company site)
Sama
Sama sells training data annotation for robotics and manufacturing models, from assembly lines to autonomous mobile robots, with workflows that load up to 14 sensors (cameras, LiDAR, radar, ultrasonic) and multiple point clouds.
Source: Sama
TransPerfect DataForce
DataForce staffs on-site Tech Annotators in Paris who teleoperate robotic arms and robotic systems in real time and record and annotate the sessions, alongside AI prompt and evaluation work.
Uber
Uber AI Solutions, Uber's AI data services business, acquired Segments.ai, a multi-sensor (lidar and camera) labeling platform for robotics and autonomous driving, to build out its lidar and multi-sensor annotation services.
Source: PYMNTS
Simulation and synthetic data
Simulated scenes and generated data used beside human data.
Axis Robotics
Axis Robotics describes its data engine as one closed-loop workflow that combines large-scale simulation, egocentric real-world capture and human-in-the-loop post-training to produce robotic training data.
Source: Axis Robotics (company blog)
Lightwheel
Lightwheel describes itself as a Physical AI infrastructure company building SimReady simulation assets, egocentric human data and evaluation platforms for robot training.
NVIDIA's Lightwheel case study says Google DeepMind, Figure, AgiBot, ByteDance, Geely and BYD use Lightwheel's simulation assets and synthetic datasets for embodied AI.
Turing
In a February 2026 job posting Turing says it is building the data layer for Physical AI across four pillars: synthetic data (sim), robot teleoperation, human motion capture and data enrichment.
Other robotics data services
Data collection and operations services that fit none of the above.
Asimov
Asimov, listed in Y Combinator's company directory, collects real-world human movement data from households and businesses to train humanoid robots.
Source: Y Combinator (company directory)
Bones Studio
BONES-SEED is a curated subset of Bones Studio's larger motion capture library, with expanded datasets available for commercial licensing.
Config
Config plans to scale operations in Vietnam and Seoul to collect one million hours of robotic data, grow its enterprise platform to 10 million US dollars ARR by the end of 2027 and launch a cloud Robot-as-a-Service product.
Source: Foley Hoag LLP
micro1
Building a robotics pre-training dataset by having hundreds of generalists record everyday object interactions in their own homes (as CEO Ali Ansari told TechCrunch).
Counts robotics company 1X among its customers, alongside frontier AI labs, Microsoft and Amazon.
TELUS Digital
TELUS Digital said NelsonHall named it a Leader in its 2026 NEAT evaluation for AI Enablement Services, with its physical AI and robotics data capabilities cited as a key strength.
Transdev
Transdev's Alternative Services division sells AV operations work to autonomous vehicle companies: L2 Operators work directly with self-driving vehicles on the road, troubleshoot software and hardware issues and feed back to engineering teams, and L3 Specialists test unreleased software and do mapping.
Vision Lab
Vision Lab works with more than 2,000 factories across Asia and Africa, mainly in China and India, to collect real production-floor data for robot training.
Source: Techsauce
Welo Data
Welo Data sells fully managed robotics and physical AI data collection: it rents the space, recruits participants, secures the site, runs collection, checks quality and delivers model-ready data.
Source: Welo Data
Frequently asked questions
What do robotics teams use instead of Mercor or Scale AI for data?
Specialist providers for each part of the work: operators who teleoperate robots to record demonstrations, networks of people who film first-person video of everyday tasks, annotation teams for robot and sensor data, and simulation companies. This page lists 34 of them, grouped by the service, each with what it says it sells for robotics, from its own pages or reporting.
How do you choose a robotics data provider?
Match the provider to the data your model needs (teleoperated robot demonstrations, human first-person video, labels, or simulation), then ask for a pilot on your own robot or task, the review and rejection rules for data, where the people doing the work are and how they are paid, and who owns the data and the consent behind it. The research report beside this page adds each provider's funding, workforce and the pay it states.