SUMMARY
- Provision Labs, Anjali Sardana’s San Francisco physical AI startup, has acquired Mumbai hardware company Basilisk Industries for an undisclosed sum.
- Basilisk founder Shourya Watwani now heads hardware, with work on 3D hand tracking, perception hardware and a lightweight tactile glove.
- Pronto’s home-camera pilot drew privacy backlash in May, so consent and data handling will decide how far this physical AI bet goes.
Pronto launched in 2025 as an instant home-help app. Now its founder Anjali Sardana Physical AI is buying a hardware company.
On Nov 2, Inc42 reported that Provision Labs, Anjali Sardana’s San Francisco-based physical AI venture, has acquired Mumbai’s Basilisk Industries for an undisclosed sum. A Business Today profile published this week frames the deal as the next step in the Anjali Sardana physical AI plan. It’s a bigger shift than the headline suggests.
What Provision Labs actually bought
Basilisk was founded by Shourya Watwani in 2023 and worked on perception technology, the sensors and models that help machines make sense of their surroundings. Watwani now leads hardware at Provision and works on its in-house post-processing models, according to Sardana’s LinkedIn post.
The team has already built a 3D hand-tracking model, redesigned Provision’s perception hardware and made an early version of a lightweight tactile glove meant to capture touch data. That last one is the interesting bit. Video shows what a hand does. A glove can record how it feels.
The price isn’t public. Provision is also hiring in San Francisco, Toronto and Bengaluru across computer vision, perception, tactile data, environment reconstruction and hardware.
Read More: Pronto Founder Anjali Sardana Just Launched a US Physical AI Startup. Here’s What We Know
From laundry to labelled data
Provision describes itself as a data, evaluation and deployment layer for physical AI, meaning AI that acts in the real world through robots and other machines. The plan is to source training data from professionals across sectors and help developers test and deploy their models.
The link to Pronto is straightforward in theory. Sardana is CEO of both companies. Pronto’s opt-in Verified programme is exploring anonymised recordings of household tasks for AI training. But Business Today notes the two companies haven’t publicly detailed how much data is shared between them.
On the money side, reports name Lachy Groom, General Catalyst, Bain Capital Ventures and Glade Brook Capital as Provision’s backers. The round size hasn’t been disclosed. The investor overlap with Pronto is hard to miss. Groom put in a $20 million extension that took Pronto’s Series B to $45 million at a $200 million valuation. TechCrunch reported that Glade Brook has backed both Pronto and Physical Intelligence, the robotics company Groom co-founded.
Read More: Birlasoft OpenAI Partnership: 5 Things That Will Decide Its Growth Over the Next 12 Months
The privacy question hasn’t gone away
In May, reports said Pronto was piloting camera-equipped workers inside customers’ homes to collect footage for robotics training. The backlash was quick. Pronto said customers had to opt in at booking, that the pilot covered less than 0.01% of users, that it complied with India’s DPDP Act, and that footage wouldn’t go to third-party AI labs, Inc42 reported.
Rivals drew a line. Snabbit said it ran a one-time simulation at a training centre with data collection startup Human Archive. Urban Company said it has never recorded inside customers’ homes and has no plans to.
Sardana’s counter-argument, as told to Business Today, is about who gets paid. Billions are going into AI, she says, and the workers whose everyday tasks could train these systems should share in the value. She also says more than half of the professionals in the Verified programme earn over Rs 40,000 a month. That figure comes from her own LinkedIn post, so treat it as self-reported.
Asked about building in India with little prior experience, she told Business Today that if you were prepared, you probably wouldn’t do it.
What founders can take from this
The deal size is unknown, so read the signal, not the number.
An operating business can double as a data engine. Pronto’s day-to-day work is exactly the kind of real-world activity physical AI needs. Whether that’s a smart reuse of an asset or a consent problem depends entirely on how it’s handled.
Buying can beat building. Provision bought a team that had already worked on hand tracking and a tactile glove. For a young company in a fast field, an acquisition is a shortcut to hardware talent.
Consent is now a product feature. If your startup collects data inside people’s homes or workplaces, “opt-in” has to be visible, specific and easy to withdraw. Our read: the Anjali Sardana physical AI story will be judged on that as much as on the hardware.
Watch for three things next: the first Provision product, any detail on data flow between Pronto and Provision, and how regulators treat in-home recording under the DPDP Act.
If you’re building in this space, here’s the short version:
- Provision Labs has added hardware depth through Basilisk, with Watwani leading and a tactile glove already in early form.
- Pronto and Provision share a CEO and an investor circle, but their data-sharing arrangement isn’t public.
- Privacy and consent, not just technology, will set the pace for physical AI built on Indian homes and workers.
What do you think: smart pivot or a privacy risk waiting to happen? Tell us in the comments, share this with a founder who’s watching physical AI, and keep following StartupIndiaX for the next round of India startup news.
FAQs
Who is Anjali Sardana?
She founded Pronto, an instant home services startup, in 2025. She’s also CEO of Provision Labs, a San Francisco-based physical AI venture, and continues to run both companies.
What is Provision Labs?
Provision Labs is a San Francisco-based startup building a data, evaluation and deployment layer for physical AI. It collects real-world data to train and test robots and other machines that act in physical environments.
What did Provision Labs acquire?
It acquired Basilisk Industries, a Mumbai-based hardware startup founded in 2023 that focused on perception technology. The sum is undisclosed. Founder Shourya Watwani joins as head of hardware.
What is physical AI?
Physical AI refers to AI systems that perceive, decide and act in the real world through machines such as robot arms and mobile robots, instead of only generating text or images.
Why did Pronto face a privacy backlash?
In May, reports said Pronto was piloting camera-equipped workers in customers’ homes to gather robotics training data. Pronto says the pilot was opt-in, limited, DPDP-compliant and not shared with third-party AI labs.
Is the Basilisk deal value known?
No. Both Inc42 and Business Today report the financial terms as undisclosed, and Provision Labs hasn’t shared its funding round size either.
