Microagi's Shift offers free private chefs in San Francisco in exchange for footage of their work
Microagi's CEO says the company pays more than 35,000 people in over 15 countries to film physical tasks, Business Insider reported. Robotics is short of training data, so startups are buying footage of skilled work such as private cooking.
The Board Room · Leadership desk
Key figures: demand for robot training data is roughly 10 times higher than a year ago, per Encord. Encord customers once requested 1,000 hours of annotated data and now want 10,000 or even 100,000 hours.
| Figure | Value | Note | Claim |
|---|---|---|---|
| Robot training data demand vs a year ago, per Encord | 10 times, roughly | 12 | |
| Hours of data once requested | 1,000 hours | 13 | |
| Hours Encord customers now want | 10,000 hours | or even 100,000 | 13 |
What happened
- Chef Aliser Demir cooked a three-course dinner for a Business Insider reporter and two friends this summer while a camera on his baseball cap recorded everything.
- Encord's Vineeth Velmurugan said demand for robot training data is roughly 10 times higher than a year ago.
- Robotics companies raised $33.4 billion in the first half of this year, according to PitchBook, topping the $28.7 billion raised in all of 2025.
- Elsewhere, contract workers in Mexico and the Philippines remotely operate robots in American warehouses to generate movement data for the machines.
Why it matters
- cost Footage from skilled trades costs whatever those trades already charge, and in Demir's case Shift pays it so the diners do not.
- constraint Plain video may not satisfy every buyer, since Mecka moved to force-sensing gloves after ordinary video hit its limits.
- decision Buyers placing larger data orders are committing money before anyone has shown that more footage turns a demo into a full working shift.
The diagnosis is widely held, according to Kyle Chan, a fellow at the Brookings Institution who studies technology and industrial policy. "It is widely agreed in the robotics world that data is the key bottleneck," he said [11]. Order sizes show the scale. Customers such as Dyna Robotics and Agility Robotics used to ask Encord for 1,000 hours of annotated data at a time, and now they ask for 10,000 or even 100,000, said Vineeth Velmurugan, who leads robot learning at the AI data startup Encord [13]. That is a tenfold to hundredfold jump in a single request [16]. Both the demand figure and the order sizes describe Encord's own customers [12][13].
Shift pays its contributors on two scales. It said participants can earn up to $30 an hour [15]. For Chef Aliser Demir it offered his usual rate of $100 to $150 per person, while the diners ate free [3][1]. The units differ, per person served against per hour, and Business Insider did not report Demir's hours, so the two rates cannot be compared. In our view the tradeoff is plain: general contributors buy volume at a capped hourly rate, and skilled ones buy a specific skill at whatever the trade already charges. "I've been feeding people since I started this job," Demir said. "Now I am also feeding AI." [4]
Investor money is running ahead of the evidence. The first-half robotics total beat 2025's full-year total by $4.7 billion [10]. Business Insider describes a wide gap between robots that look impressive in a demo and robots dependable enough to get through an eight-hour shift on a factory floor, and says robotics companies hope more training data will help close it [6]. We think the sequencing matters to a buyer. A company that signs for 100,000 hours this quarter will have the footage in hand well before it learns whether its robots last a full shift.
The format of the footage is a separate question for a service built on a cap camera. Mecka AI, which has raised more than $120 million, started two years ago with an app that paid people to record everyday activities, then ran into the limits of ordinary video [7]. It now designs headgear and sensor-equipped gloves to "sensorize humans," CEO Josh Gao said, capturing both motion and force: how much pressure it takes to hold a glass, for instance, or to crack an egg [8].
What to watch
- Whether any robotics company reports that models trained on 10,000 or more hours of footage hold up over a full eight-hour shift.
- Whether Microagi or Shift discloses who buys its footage and whether its cap cameras capture force or only video.
- Whether PitchBook's full-year 2026 robotics total keeps climbing past the $33.4 billion raised in the first half.
Clarity's read
What the record supports and how the coverage leans. The claims behind it follow.
Reality
- Evidence55
- Adoption50
- Hype gap+25
- Incentives70
- Confidence60
Claim ledger
Ranked by verification strength, evidence, and original report placement.
- [1]
Shift, the data-collection arm of the German startup Microagi, offers free private chefs in San Francisco in exchange for first-person footage of their work; the dinner at the reporter's apartment was free.
- [2]
One Friday evening this summer, Chef Aliser Demir prepared a three-course meal of burrata salad, baked salmon and tiramisu for the reporter and two friends while a camera mounted on his baseball cap recorded everything.
- [3]
Shift offered to pay Demir, who runs a private chef business, his usual rate of $100 to $150 per person.
- [4]
Demir said: "I've been feeding people since I started this job. Now I am also feeding AI."
- [5]
Robotics companies raised $33.4 billion globally in the first half of this year, according to PitchBook data, surpassing the $28.7 billion raised in all of 2025.
- [6]
A gulf remains between robots that perform impressive demos and machines reliable enough to work an eight-hour factory shift; robotics companies hope more training data will help.
- [7]
Mecka AI, which has raised more than $120 million from investors including Sequoia and Nvidia, started two years ago with an app that paid people to record everyday activities, but soon ran into the limits of ordinary video.
- [8]
Mecka now designs headgear and sensor-equipped gloves to "sensorize humans," CEO Josh Gao said; the equipment records movements and force, such as the pressure needed to grip a glass or crack an egg.
- [9]
Contract workers in Mexico and the Philippines remotely control robots in American warehouses as they pack beauty products, recording movements so the machines can eventually do the work on their own.
- [10]
First-half robotics funding of $33.4 billion exceeded the full-year 2025 total of $28.7 billion by $4.7 billion.
- [11]
Kyle Chan, a Brookings Institution fellow who studies technology and industrial policy, said: "It is widely agreed in the robotics world that data is the key bottleneck."
- [12]
Demand for robot training data is roughly 10 times higher than a year ago, according to Vineeth Velmurugan, who leads robot learning at the AI data startup Encord.
- [13]
Encord's customers, including Dyna Robotics and Agility Robotics, once requested 1,000 hours of annotated data and now want 10,000 or even 100,000, Velmurugan said.
- [14]
Microagi, the parent company of Shift, pays more than 35,000 people across more than 15 countries to record themselves performing physical tasks, CEO Bercan Kilic said.
- [15]
Shift said participants can earn up to $30 an hour.
- [16]
A request growing from 1,000 hours to 10,000 or 100,000 hours is a tenfold to hundredfold increase in size.
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Sources
1 independent publisher whose own reporting we read for this story.
- businessinsider.comInside the race to train robots on human work
1 article · October 15, 2026
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