Provision Labs, a San Francisco company that collects data for training physical AI systems, has acquired Basilisk Industries, a Mumbai-based hardware startup that works on perception technology. Provision's chief executive, Anjali Sardana, who also runs Bengaluru home-services startup Pronto, announced the deal in a LinkedIn post on November 2, 2026, Inc42 reported.
The companies did not disclose the price or any other terms. Basilisk's founder, Shourya Watwani, and his team are joining Provision. Watwani will lead Provision's hardware work and will also develop its in-house post-processing models, according to Inc42 and Indian Startup News.
The purchase came about a week after Provision Labs launched in late October, Indian Startup News reported.
What Basilisk built
Watwani founded Basilisk in 2023. The startup focused on perception, the technology that lets machines make sense of what is around them.
According to Sardana's post, as reported by Inc42, Watwani's team had already done several pieces of work for Provision before the acquisition. It built a model that tracks hands in three dimensions, redesigned the perception hardware Provision uses, and produced a first version of a lightweight glove with sensors that capture data about touch.
Basilisk's funding history, investors and headcount were not reported, and none of the coverage gave a website for the company.
Why Provision is buying
Provision collects real-world data that companies can use to train and test physical AI, meaning AI systems that carry out tasks in the physical world through robots and other machines. The company plans to gather that data from professionals in a range of sectors around the world.
Bringing Basilisk in-house gives Provision its own team for perception, 3D hand tracking and touch data, the technology it relies on to capture that information. LocalSamosa, in its weekly roundup, described the deal as strengthening exactly those areas.
Provision is also expanding its engineering and research teams in San Francisco, Toronto and Bengaluru, with open roles in computer vision, perception, tactile data, environment reconstruction and hardware, Inc42 reported. Its backers are Lachy Groom, General Catalyst, Bain Capital Ventures and Glade Brook Capital, all of which had earlier invested in Pronto, according to Indian Startup News. Provision has not disclosed how much it has raised or what it is valued at.
The Pronto connection
Sardana is chief executive of both Provision and Pronto, a Bengaluru company founded in 2025 that supplies trained domestic workers for household services. Pronto said it was handling 26,000 bookings a day and had 6,500 service workers, up from 1,440 in January, and Bank of America has estimated its share of India's instant home services market at about 20%, Indian Startup News reported.
Provision's launch followed scrutiny of a Pronto pilot in which service workers wore cameras while cleaning, washing dishes and folding laundry in customers' homes. The pilot drew attention in May after investor documents described plans for a data business built on Pronto's workforce to capture household footage for robotics labs, and reports said India's IT ministry, MeitY, took note. The concerns centred on privacy, consent and how the footage was stored.
Pronto said customers had to opt in when 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 was not shared with outside AI labs. In July it launched an opt-in programme, Pronto Verified, which records video without audio; the company says raw footage is deleted after each job and only anonymised footage is kept for AI training. Neither company has said whether Provision will use data collected through Pronto.
A wider race for robot training data
Other Indian home-services companies have taken different positions on recording. Inc42 reported that Snabbit ran a one-time simulation test with data collection startup Human Archive at a training centre, while Urban Company said it has never recorded inside customers' homes and has no plans to do so.
