Shift, the worker platform run by Berlin-based MicroAGI, says its site counters show more than 25,000 people on the platform filming household chores and skilled trades for robot training, a figure no outside source has confirmed. The claim lands as DoorDash and Instawork have entered the same business within months, and as regulators begin asking who else ends up in the frame.
What Shift says it is
Shift pays individuals and businesses to record first-person video of real tasks, including cooking, cleaning, repairs and trades, using head-mounted cameras. According to the company's website (accessed Nov. 2, 2026), the footage is processed, stripped of identifying details and converted into training data for robots and AI systems. Contributors work as independent contractors.
The numbers on the site depend on where you look. The U.S. page displays "$10,000,000+ paid out," while the EU page shows separate counters for 25K+ people and $5M+ paid. All of these are company claims, and the counters appear to vary by locale and over time.
Independent estimates are fuzzier still. Fast Company reported on June 28, 2026 that Shift has "dozens of thousands" of operators worldwide, with more than a thousand in the U.S. and most recordings made in New York City. Some third-party write-ups repeat a figure of "35,000+" without citing a primary source. That number should be treated as unverified.
The money behind the company is easier to pin down. MicroAGI raised a $55 million seed round on July 16-17, 2026, billed as the largest seed round in Germany, according to Semafor. Hummingbird led, and Northzone, LocalGlobe, Village Global and Redalpine also took part. On Oct. 12, Dealroom relayed a company LinkedIn post claiming MicroAGI had passed $100 million in annual recurring revenue six months after Shift launched. That, too, is self-reported.
Why robot makers want your kitchen
Developers building robots have a data problem: there is not much real-world video of people doing ordinary work from their own point of view. Ego4D, the largest public dataset of its kind, holds more than 3,600 hours, according to its maintainers. Ego-Exo4D V2 offers 1,286 hours, of which 221 are egocentric. Scale AI collected 100,000 hours of robotics training footage at a San Francisco lab, TechXplore reported in November 2025, though that figure is now a year old and the number has likely moved.
Research may be raising the value of what people film. Several 2026 arXiv papers, describing systems called EgoEngine, Ego2Robot and HumanEgo, report better zero-shot and few-shot transfer (a robot performing a task it has seen little or never practiced) from human egocentric video to robot actions. If the methods hold up, they could reduce reliance on expensive teleoperation, where humans remotely pilot machines to generate training examples.
Capgemini Research Institute's May 2026 report describes "Physical AI" as a shift that separates intelligence from robot hardware through shared models and data. Capital has followed. Skild AI raised a $1.4 billion Series C on Jan. 14, 2026, and PitchBook and NVCA data cited by Axios showed U.S. venture dollars reaching a record in the first half of 2026.
For MicroAGI cofounder Anton Poletaev, the appeal is variety. "If you're getting exposed to different lighting conditions, to different kitchen types, different living rooms, different taps … then you're able to generalize," he told Fast Company.
Shift, DoorDash, Instawork and the rest
Shift's most visible experiment is a free home-cleaning service it launched in New York on May 28-29, 2026, designed to capture footage inside actual homes. Harry Kilberg, the company's U.S. general manager, told Semafor the launch drew "thousands and thousands of bookings." Fast Company reported that contractors are paid about $20 an hour, according to company statements. Shift says audio generally is not recorded unless that is disclosed.
MicroAGI CEO Bercan Kilic told Semafor that some New York data would be licensed exclusively to frontier AI labs. Semafor also reported plans for factory deployments using hardware from Unitree and UBTech.
DoorDash got there first among the big gig platforms, or close to it. DoorDash Tasks launched March 19, 2026, paying Dashers to film chores, speak other languages and take photos on site. "There are more than 8 million Dashers … That's a powerful capability to digitize the physical world," said Ethan Beatty, a general manager at the company. Pilots initially exclude several jurisdictions.
Instawork opened its Robotics Lab on April 16, 2026, drawing on a network of 10 million workers. The company said more than 20,000 were certified within weeks and that it collects "hundreds of thousands of hours" of task data monthly. On June 9 it introduced Instacore, a five-camera wearable. Those figures come from the company.
Smaller players are crowding in. Taught pays "Teachers" royalties of 40% to 70%, depending on level, and is not tied to a single robot maker. OpenTrain AI job ads list $14 to $30 an hour for household video collection, and micro1 is recruiting video collectors. Human Archive has released HA-Ego-500, a dataset with 500 hours and more than 310,000 action steps.
Factory operators, meanwhile, are building their own data loops. Boston Dynamics opened its Robotics Metaplant Application Center at Hyundai's Georgia plant on Sept. 21, 2026, and Chief Product and Technology Officer Zack Jackowski called it a "Robot Behavior Factory." BMW said Figure 02 supported more than 30,000 cars over ten months in 2025 pilots.
The privacy question
Privacy is where the pressure is building. Veena Dubal, a University of California, Irvine law professor, told Fast Company: "The average person doesn't think about the downstream harms … maybe they'll be invisible." She also raised the prospect of the data being used to "control workers in new ways."
Regulators in Europe are paying attention. In October 2026, the European Data Protection Board flagged the risk of bystander consent in smart-glasses capture. It warned against relying on "legitimate interests" as a basis for AI training with wearables and urged data minimization and on-device blurring. The EU AI Act's transparency duties took effect in August 2026, and high-risk systems must meet data-quality criteria.
In the U.S., California requires two-party consent for audio recording, which makes Shift's video-only default something of a hedge.
Poletaev put the trade-off plainly. "Yes, we are getting your data, but by doing so you're finally getting rewarded for it, and you're not being lied to," he said. Whether the people who wander through a contributor's living room feel the same way is a question the industry has not yet had to answer.
