Figure launches Index, a paid crowdsourced human-video pipeline to train humanoids
On 2026-08-25 Figure took its Index program out of stealth: an app that pays people worldwide to film household and workplace tasks, which had already gathered 16M videos from 108 countries and pays ~$15M to contributors so far, to pretrain its Helix robot foundation model.
Key facts
- 16 million videos uploaded; 264,000 app downloads; 44,000 weekly active contributors; 108 countries
- Processes ~30 minutes of uploaded video every second (~4.9 years of human work per day)
- Per 1,000 hours: 373 unique tasks, 1,146 unique objects, 116 unique environments
- $15M paid to creators to date; Figure commits >$1B on data and compute over the next 12 months
What happened
Index turns human egocentric video into the pretraining corpus for robots: submissions go through quality filters, fraud review, deduplication, rebalancing and hierarchical captioning. Three weeks later Figure showed that Index pretraining yields a 6x jump in zero-shot household task success (Helix 2.5).
Why it matters
Data scarcity is the core bottleneck for robot foundation models; Index is the largest attempt to buy real-world physical data at internet scale and has labor-market implications (people paid to demonstrate the work robots will learn).
Changelog
- 2026-09-29: created
Related events
- Figure Helix 2.5: humanoids do chores zero-shot in 30 never-seen homes ★★★★★
- Figure Helix 02: one neural network controls a humanoid's whole body from pixels ★★★★
Sources (2)
id: 2026-08-25-figure-index-dataset · updated 2026-09-29 · open in the interactive timeline