{"slug": "can-a-robotics-startup-survive-by-pivoting-from-hardware-to-data-scraping", "title": "Can a robotics startup survive by pivoting from hardware to data scraping?", "summary": "Tangible, a robotics startup that originally built the Eggie humanoid robot, has pivoted to building an AI foundation model for robotics and is now scraping over 1 million hours of POV video from the internet, according to public posts from one of its engineers. The company has laid off approximately 50% of its team, leaving fewer than 10 people, and is burning significant GPU hours while models only work for basic tasks, raising questions about the viability of this pivot.", "body_md": "| ||||||||||||\n1 point by |\nAccording to public posts from one of their engineers, they're now: · Scraping 1M+ hours of POV video from the internet · Burning significant GPU hours while models only work for basic tasks · Down to <10 people after laying off ~50% of the team This raises a broader question: · Is scraping public video a viable long-term data strategy, or a dead end? · Are there examples of hardware companies that successfully made this pivot? They originally built Eggie, a multipurpose humanoid robot, but Tangible has since pivoted to building an AI foundation model for robotics. | |||||||||||\nApplications are open till July 27. |", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/can-a-robotics-startup-survive-by-pivoting-from-hardware-to-data-scraping", "canonical_source": "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49156487", "published_at": "2026-08-03 14:43:41+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-08-03 14:52:45.331104+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["robotics", "artificial-intelligence", "ai-startups"], "entities": ["Tangible", "Eggie"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/can-a-robotics-startup-survive-by-pivoting-from-hardware-to-data-scraping", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/can-a-robotics-startup-survive-by-pivoting-from-hardware-to-data-scraping.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/can-a-robotics-startup-survive-by-pivoting-from-hardware-to-data-scraping.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/can-a-robotics-startup-survive-by-pivoting-from-hardware-to-data-scraping.jsonld"}}