Pakistani startup world context becomes training data hub for US robotics

Pakistani startup World Context is recording the precise movements of thousands of industrial workers and packaging that data for U.S. robotics companies, founder Sherdil Ali Khan said, betting Pakistan’s large industrial workforce can help fill a growing gap in robot training data.

The company’s premise is that countries funding artificial intelligence, led by the United States, no longer have industrial labor at the scale required for robot pre-training, while Pakistan still has a large workforce performing the physical tasks robots need to learn.

Founded in January 2026, World Context currently employs roughly 8,000 factory workers across tooling, textiles, electronics, automotive, heavy industry, healthcare, logistics and specialty manufacturing.

Workers are paid twice their previous wages and equipped with smart gloves, head-mounted and wrist cameras, and foot-mounted inertial measurement units to capture contact-rich movements such as gripping, pressing, adjusting and assembling — tasks that remain among the more difficult physical skills for robots to learn.

The recordings are made under written contracts, audited for quality and documented for provenance, according to the company. The resulting datasets are designed for export to robotics laboratories and companies in the U.S. and elsewhere that require large volumes of real-world human activity data.

“The economies funding AI, led by the United States, no longer contain industrial labor at the scale that robot pre-training requires,” Khan said. “Pakistan’s industrial labor force is one of the few in the world large enough to supply that volume.”

While AI is widely expected to reduce employment in many countries, Khan argues that a different trend is beginning to emerge in Pakistan.

World Context has created a new category of work in which skilled industrial workers are paid to demonstrate and document tasks they already know how to perform, turning their physical expertise into data that can be used to train robots.

The company is also accepting custom orders, allowing robotics teams to request tailored datasets covering specific modalities, tasks and environments, with samples and pricing available on request.

“The chain of compute, data, models, and applications is the superintelligence supply chain,” Khan said. “Pakistan’s entry point into that chain is data. World Context opened it.”