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We Paid Users $300K to Upload Their Camera Rolls, Homework, and Dashcam Footage
- Avipat_ 1y agoWe launched Kled 6 weeks ago as a data marketplace for everyday people. Users upload personal content like camera rolls, dashcam footage, homework, POV recordings, and original music, and we pay them for it. While AI companies scrape public data to train their models, we’re building a platform that compensates users and gives AI labs access to licensed, high-quality data. The product took off quickly. We did over 20 million impressions on Twitter, more than 10,000 people signed up, petabytes of data were uploaded, and we’ve paid out over $300,000 to users. Every file uploaded is automatically classified and made searchable so AI companies can instantly license the exact datasets they need. Over the next five weeks, we’re doubling down on our labeling operations and hiring top AI engineers. We’ve raised over $2 million in venture capital at a $40 million valuation. High pay and high equity. Email avi@kled.ai
- codingdave 1y agoJob postings go here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44757794 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44757794
- amelius 1y agoWait a minute, if users upload their camera rolls, doesn't that mean that in most cases these also contain footage of __other__ people? Sorry, but wtf?!?
- Forgeties79 1y agoI’m also curious about this. I’m not having a strong reaction yet because I’m just not quite sure what to make of it, though at first glance it certainly has me going “wait what?” I hope it’s not just some boiler plate legalese about how you have to make sure you have the rights to everything you upload.
- Avipat_ 1y agoIt’s not just boilerplate. We actively verify uploads using multiple signals: EXIF metadata, timestamps, device signatures, and visual similarity checks. If a file wasn't captured by the uploader’s device or shows signs of being scraped/copied, it gets flagged or rejected. In short, if it's not your original content, it won’t pass. And we’re constantly tightening this loop as we scale.
- Forgeties79 1y agoI think I’m less worried about whether or not it’s my original content and more about whether or not what I shot is ok to sell That being said I did not consider that side of things, and I think it’s great you’re so proactive about it. Hopefully that does not come off as condescending/patronizing!
- Avipat_ 1y agoCorrect but the person who took the pic/vid owns the rights for it legally speaking. This content is already being trained off of, scraped off YouTube, Instagram etc. All Kled does is put the money back into the pockets of the people.
- Forgeties79 1y agoDo they? That’s not an assumption you can make. I’ve likely got plenty of things in my phone I’m not allowed to have just by accident
- amelius 1y agoYeah, this sounds like just another sleazy way of a tech company to shove the liability to the user.
- lurk2 1y agoThis will never fly in the EU.
- Avipat_ 1y agoworking on it
- echoangle 1y ago> Correct but the person who took the pic/vid owns the rights for it legally speaking. Not really, there are a lot of ways to take images/videos you aren't legally allowed to publish later. You can have them for yourself but you can't share them publically (or give to a company like yours).
- gyanchawdhary 1y agoWow, you’ve cracked the mystery of photography .. sometimes people take pictures of other people. What’s next, discovering that mirrors reflect more than just yourself and that’s a valid wtf moment in your world view too …
- Avipat_ 1y agolol yea, not sure what that guy is on
- amelius 1y agoRead the rest of the comments in this subthread, then maybe you will understand what this is about.
- Avipat_ 1y ago[flagged]
- amelius 1y agoHave you talked to lawyers?
- lurk2 1y agoYou are a 21 year old self-promoter and your post was flagged in less than 30 minutes. You don’t have the kind of clout where you can afford to be calling people braindead on an account tied to your LinkedIn profile.
- Avipat_ 1y agoI've literally never used HN before, a friend suggested I write a post on here for hiring. Lol last thing I care about is self promotion, we're doing just fine.
- lurk2 1y ago> I've literally never used HN before You created your account a year ago. Did your friend suggest that you write this post a year ago? > Lol last thing I care about is self promotion, we're doing just fine. At the top of your likes on your LinkedIn profile, you have a post linking to an interview you did on YouTube entitled: How to Grow an Instagram Account in 2025 (Easy Mode) - Avi Patel. It was uploaded 3 months ago from the time the screenshot was taken and has 162 views. Your entire public profile is like this: > Founder & CEO of Nitrility which is the world's first music licensing marketplace working with over a billion $ in assets from 80K rightsholders. > Age 21 as of August, high school diploma (Rutgers Prep), college dropout (UIUC), grew up in Somerset NJ, 2 time founder with 1 exit at age 18, 2400 rated chess player, former top tennis player, Forbes Technology Council. > Usually you will find me in NYC, LA, or SF. This kind of thing doesn’t work here. You aren’t Mark Zuckerberg, and we aren’t living in the 2010s anymore.
- lampiaio 1y agoNo one cares about the aggregated sum you spent, and something tells me that instead of directly saying how much the average user was paid, the PR team chose to divulge the total amount because it sounds better (someone must have pat themselves on the back when they phrased it as "we paid users $300K").
- Avipat_ 1y agothe money came directly from AI Labs paying for it. not venture or anything else.
- lurk2 1y agoThat isn’t the issue. If you paid $300,000 to 300,000 users, each user made a dollar.
- Avipat_ 1y agoWe paid $300,000 to 500 users, there's over 10,000 on the waitlist still. Each of them have uploaded over 200GB of data. Some at the 1TB limit.
- lurk2 1y agoThat’s a better ratio than I would have expected, but I would have led with that. The title as it is written reads as a bait and switch. I initially read it as: “We paid a plurality of users $300,000 each for all of their data.” It’s probably obvious to most readers that this isn’t what happened ($300,000 would be an absurd price for someone’s camera roll), but it feels misleading. People respond to that kind of thing really negatively here, which is probably why your post got flagged.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- minimaxir 1y agoWhy did you omit that it's a cryptocurrency? https://x.com/useKled/status/1932778949051838827 https://x.com/useKled/status/1932778949051838827
- pogue 1y agoOh man, sounded promising until discovering it was a rug pull. I wonder if user data does have some value. I could see long haul dashcam footage possibility being worth something if you were training self driving cars...
- slowmotarget 1y agoIt's funny I had a similar idea but with dashcams, for the automotive industry. You could pay people to install additional cameras to there cars and pay them by the miles driven. I'm sure car manufacturers would love this training data.
- Avipat_ 1y agowe have around 4000 uber drives that are being onboarded now all uploading their dashcam footage. will see how valubale that data is soon.
- CobrastanJorji 1y agoIt's a reasonable idea. Certainly it makes sense that AI companies need training data and people should have a way to sell that data to them. That said, given that the government seems to be moving in a "copyright does not apply to AI" direction, I would not want to putting my eggs in an "AI companies will pay for data" basket.
- Avipat_ 1y agoThey are actively paying for it now, and regulation is moving in that direction as well. Regardless, someone's camera roll data, for example, isn't publicly available, meaning it can be sold, unlike someone's Instagram photos.
- lurk2 1y agoPrivate repositories of data will still be valuable due to AI content making public content not suitable for training purposes; but if copyright doesn’t apply the real issue is identifying the content, not paying for it; paying for it might be worse as you’re creating an incentive to upload junk data.
- lurk2 1y ago>Backed by Leaders: Built with insights from top minds across AI, mobility, and consumer tech. NASA, Pika, Google, Meta, Tesla, character.ai. Backed how? Are these companies endorsing your product? Are they customers? Do you have employees who worked for them?
- alexcroox 1y agoPaid in their own crypto… https://x.com/useKled/status/1932778949051838827 https://x.com/useKled/status/1932778949051838827