My AI startup pays people to film themselves taking out the trash. It's now valued at $150 million.

• Avi Patel, 22, says most AI is trained on stolen data, and his startup wants to change that.
• Kled AI pays people for iPhone photos and videos. It then sells the data to AI and robotics firms.
• The startup just raised $6.5 million at a $150 million valuation.

Avi Patel is the 22-year-old founder of Kled AI, a San Francisco startup that buys and resells personal data from everyday people to train AI.

Patel dropped out of college after only two weeks in 2021 to become a founder. While running a music licensing startup, Patel was flooded with requests for AI training data — and pivoted to building a platform to supply it.

Now, Kled AI pays people to send videos of themselves taking out the trash or photos of potholes on a road. That data is then resold to robotics and self-driving companies so they can improve their own AI.

While Kled AI is available worldwide, it's become especially popular in countries like the Philippines, where an extra $20 to $40 a month just for uploading photos makes a bigger difference, Patel says.

The startup is part of a new cohort of AI training startups meeting booming demand for data to power the latest and greatest AI systems. This essay is based on a conversation with Patel, which has been edited for length and clarity.

I dropped out of college after two weeks

I was studying computer science at the University of Illinois, but I just didn't like school. So I left and started a company right away.

My first company was in music licensing. We built a marketplace where artists could upload their music, and companies could license it instantly. We had hundreds of millions of songs, but the business didn't really work. Dealing with record labels was just too costly.

At the same time, I kept getting requests for data. Companies building AI models were asking if we had training data. That's when I realized this was a much bigger opportunity.

Most data has been taken without people getting paid

At first, we tried a simple model — buying content from production houses and reselling it. It was boring. It was just a sales business.

So I thought: why not collect data directly from people instead? That's what Kled AI does. We built an app where anyone can upload photos, videos, or other data and get paid for it.

Most companies today scrape your data without paying you. We're trying to flip that. People upload it voluntarily, and we pay them.

We ask people for very specific data

The key difference is that we don't just collect random data. We assign tasks.

We might ask someone to take a video of themselves taking out the trash. That's useful for robotics.

We might ask someone to take a picture of a food delivery sitting at their front door. That helps with delivery and mapping systems.

Or we'll ask people to take two photos of the same scene — one with an object, one without it. That's useful for image editing tools.

Because we guide what people upload, the data is much higher quality. We also only allow photos from people who use newer iPhones.

The app took off in developing countries

We launched about two months ago. It hit No. 1 on the App Store in Malaysia and took off in places like the Philippines and Indonesia. We now have over 200,000 users and get about 5 million uploads a day.

A lot of our users are in lower-income countries. In Malaysia, for example, our average user makes $20 to $40 a month just uploading casually. Our top users are making around $2,000.

We pay the same rates globally. I want everyone to have a fair shot.

Some users are turning this into a full-time job

One of our top earners is a truck driver in the US. He has multiple cameras on his truck and uploads footage all day — plus photos of potholes, construction zones, and other things he sees. That data is then resold to self-driving car companies and others.

He's making about $7,400 a month. He's basically doubled his income just by uploading data. That's what I want this to become — a way for normal people to earn from the AI economy.

AI is just one part of the market

Right now, most of our customers are AI and robotics companies. But I actually think AI is only a small part of the opportunity.

There's a much bigger market in hedge funds, consumer brands, and governments that already spend trillions on data. A lot of that data has historically been scraped or taken without consent.

Companies would much rather pay for high-quality, consented data.

We just raised $6.5 million to scale this

We recently raised $6.5 million at a $150 million valuation. We're backed by Waymo founder Sebastian Thrun, the venture fund of French billionaire Bernard Arnault, and others.

The funding is going toward building fraud-detection systems — basically, making sure that when someone uploads data, it actually matches the task. We're already working with several leading AI labs.

I think everyone will eventually sell their data

Over time, I think this becomes much more passive.

For example, you could connect your Spotify or Netflix account and get paid based on how you use it. Hedge funds would pay a lot for that kind of data. People could cover their subscriptions just by sharing usage data.

Right now, we're a team of 11 people. But I think this can get much bigger.

For me, the goal is simple: instead of companies taking your data for free, you should be able to make money from it.