This startup wants to pay for your email and photos to train AI

The next wave of AI needs your photos, receipts, and emails to get smarter. One startup wants to help you get paid for it, and it's on a corporate shopping spree.

AI training startup Mode Inc has acquired two consumer applications, bringing its total buyouts in the past year to seven.

The company bought Trimbox, an inbox management app, and QR Code Reader, a code scanning app.

"We're not really focused on just going after the Mechanical Turk or the Outlier/Scale AI gig workers," Mode Inc CEO Dan Novaes told Business Insider, naming pay-per-gig contracting sites. "It's really about everyday consumers and doing the things that they do every single day."

These include uploading receipts from Amazon or Walmart purchases, streaming data, and wearable device data. The deals expand Mode Inc's portfolio to include more than 100 million monthly users, who turn in such data for cash or rewards.

While not a direct competitor, the company is part of a slew of startups such as Scale AI, Mercor, and Handshake that pay hundreds of thousands of contractors around the world to collect and label data. This data is used by companies to help improve everything from self-driving cars to OpenAI and Meta's chatbots.

Noaves said he founded Mode Inc in 2019 for people to get paid for the time they spend on their devices and the data they generate.

Take a smarter break in your day - and see how far you get.

To date, the company has handed out $1 billion in earnings, savings, and incentives. Novaes has raised about over $80 million through crowdfunding and said he intends to take the company public in the next two years.

Novaes said he believes growing legal scrutiny around AI companies' use of online content, such as recent lawsuits against Anthropic and Perplexity, will spike demand for consent-based data collection.

He shared a recent example of what an AI lab client requested.

"'Hey, we want people to submit forms that have handwriting on them,'" Novaes said, referring to doctors' notes or oil change receipts. "The point is they needed millions of documents of that. And so we basically sent out one notice to our users: Get some samples."

Mode's broader ambition is to build a portfolio of niche apps that collectively reach massive scale. Novaes said he is looking into an app that could make users' photo libraries available for AI training.

"There are two ways to get to a billion monthly active users," Novaes said. "You can create the next Telegram or Twitter, or you can acquire 1,000 apps that have a million monthly active users each."

Have a tip about startups in the AI training industry? Contact Shuby via email at sgoel@businessinsider.com or Signal at shuby.85.