# Can a robotics startup survive by pivoting from hardware to data scraping?

> Source: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49156487>
> Published: 2026-08-03 14:43:41+00:00

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According 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. | |||||||||||
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