Barbarika

The Challenge

Our work starts with one question: where does AI get the context it needs? Language models had the open internet to learn from. Physical AI has no equivalent. Robots that grasp, move, and adapt learn from records of real people doing everyday tasks, and that kind of data has always been scarce. You can’t scrape it. Someone has to record it, and they have to agree to share it.

Barbarika was built to produce that data. Its Tap My Ego program collects egocentric human video, and its robot-deployment pipeline captures trajectories, failures, and human oversight in the field. Collecting the footage is the visible part of the job. The harder part sits underneath it: consent, redaction, and provenance attached to every contribution, sovereignty kept with the people who recorded it, and a way to pay them as their data trains commercial systems. Without those safeguards, a robotics dataset carries real legal and reputational risk.

The Solution

That underlying model is what Vana’s network provides, and it is why Barbarika joined the Ecosystem Founders program. Vana helps builders turn datasets into DataDAOs: businesses that collect, govern, and monetize data owned by the people who contribute it. The program connects those founders to backers, domain experts, and data buyers, and helps them source datasets, design incentives, and get a working data business off the ground.

Barbarika fit the model closely. It already treated contributors as owners and paid them for what they recorded; Vana gave that approach a business structure. The ecosystem supports datasets across a wide range, from robotics data to trend forecasting, and Barbarika brought Physical AI into the group.

Abu Dhabi and Hub71

Last summer the work came together in Abu Dhabi. Barbarika joined other Ecosystem Founders at the Vana Founders’ Intensive, run with Hub71, Abu Dhabi’s tech ecosystem. Over the course of the intensive, with mentors and partners on hand, the founders worked on the businesses behind their datasets: incentive design, governance, and go-to-market. Hub71’s network and Vana’s backers and data buyers were in the room.

For a Physical AI data company, being there mattered. Abu Dhabi has invested heavily in AI and deep tech, and Hub71 brings founders, capital, and enterprise partners together in one place. Joining that network while Barbarika was formalizing as a DataDAO put its robotics data in front of the people most likely to fund and use it.

Why It Matters

Vana and ODL start from the same premise: AI gets better when it understands the human in front of it. For Physical AI, that understanding comes from real people recording real tasks. The companies that do well here will be the ones whose data is diverse, high-quality, and defensible, meaning it was collected with consent, carries clear provenance, and returns value to the people who created it.

Joining the Ecosystem Founders program gave Barbarika a way to operate on those terms. It can reward contributors as owners, govern its data openly, and reach the backers and buyers who give a dataset lasting value. The Founders’ Intensive in Abu Dhabi, with Hub71, is where that shift took hold.

Physical AI depends on real human data, and that data comes from people who agree to share it. Vana’s ecosystem gave us a way to build that into a business our contributors own, and the Founders’ Intensive in Abu Dhabi connected us with the backers, mentors, and partners to make it happen.

Praveen Anasurya, Founder, Barbarika