Provision Labs Acquires Hardware Startup Basilisk Industries

Provision Labs, the physical AI venture led by Pronto founder Anjali Sardana, has acquired Mumbai-based hardware startup Basilisk Industries for an undisclosed sum. The deal brings Basilisk founder Shourya Watwani and his team into Provision.

According to Sardana, who announced the deal in a LinkedIn post, Watwani will lead Provision's hardware efforts and work on its in-house post-processing models.

What Basilisk brings

Watwani founded Basilisk in 2023, with a focus on perception technologies that help machines interpret their surroundings. Sardana said the team has already built a 3D hand-tracking model, redesigned Provision's perception hardware and created the first version of a lightweight tactile glove designed to capture touch-related data.

Provision is also expanding its engineering and research teams in San Francisco, Toronto and Bengaluru. Open roles span computer vision, perception and tactile data, environment reconstruction and hardware.

Background: data for physical AI

Sardana recently launched San Francisco-based Provision Labs to collect data for training and testing physical AI systems, meaning AI built to perform real-world tasks through robots and other machines. The startup plans to source training data from professionals across sectors worldwide, helping developers deploy their models. Sardana is CEO of both Provision and Pronto.

The launch followed scrutiny of a Pronto pilot in which service professionals wore cameras while cleaning, washing dishes and folding laundry in customers' homes. The use of such footage to generate training data raised questions about privacy, consent and data storage. Pronto said customers had to opt in at booking, that the pilot covered less than 0.01% of its users, that it complied with India's Digital Personal Data Protection Act, and that footage would not be shared with third-party AI labs.

Rivals have distanced themselves from the approach. Snabbit said it ran a one-time simulation test at a training centre with data collection startup Human Archive, while Urban Company said it has never recorded inside customers' homes and has no plans to.

With in-house hardware, Provision gains more control over how it captures the visual and tactile data that physical AI developers need.