Cortex AI

Large-scale real-world robot & human data for embodied AI

Fall 2025

Active

artificial-intelligence

reinforcement-learning

robotics

San Francisco

https://cortexrobot.ai/

Large-scale real-world robot & human data for embodied AI

Cortex AI builds the world’s most diverse and large-scale real-world workplace robot & egocentric dataset — where the physical world becomes the next training and evaluation set for embodied AI. We power frontier labs developing robotics foundation models and general-purpose robots by providing the data they need: 1️⃣ Egocentric Data — real-workplace human video with hand/body pose, depth, and subtask labels. 2️⃣ Robot Data — trajectories collected from manipulators and humanoids in real industry settings. 3️⃣ Human-in-the-Loop Rollouts & Evals — real-world deployments with remote operators who recover robots when they fail, capturing data that feeds back into training and continuously improves models. Additionally, through the Cortex Marketplace, workplaces get paid to host data-collection and evaluation sessions, while labs access the in-the-wild data that truly matters. This draws on Lucas’s previous experience as co-founder of Carousell, a C2C marketplace that scaled to a $1B+ valuation.

Active Founders

Lucas Ngoo

Founder

Founder and CEO of Cortex AI. We're building the world's most diverse real-world, real-workplace, and industry-scale egocentric + robot dataset. Prior to Cortex AI, Lucas was the co-founder and CTO of Carousell (valued at $1B+).

Lucas Ngoo

Founder

Company Launches

🦾 Cortex AI — Large-Scale Real-World Data for General-Purpose Robotics

See original launch post

We’re building the world’s most diverse real-world, real-workplace egocentric + robot dataset — where the real physical world itself becomes the next training and eval set for embodied AI.

🌍 The Problem
Most robotics datasets today are captured in lab environments or simulated settings — far removed from the real physical world where robots actually need to operate.

These datasets helped build the foundation models we have today, but the next phase of embodied AI needs to learn directly from the real world — from the noise, diversity, and complexity of real workplaces.

🤖 The Solution

Frontier labs use Cortex AI through 3 stages:
1️⃣ Get real-world egocentric data → for world model + robotics foundation model pretraining
2️⃣ Collect real robot data in real workplaces
3️⃣ Roll out policies across real-world environments → the best evals happen in the real world, with our operators providing human-in-the-loop support to capture recovery data

https://youtu.be/HD-weWSzy4Y

🏭 Cortex Marketplace
We’re also launching the Cortex Marketplace, where real workplaces get paid to host egocentric-capture and robot-teleop sessions — fueling a scalable pipeline of high-quality, real-world robotics data.

👥 The Team
Prior to Cortex AI, Lucas Ngoo co-founded and served as CTO of Carousell, scaling it from an idea into a $1B+ valuation marketplace used across Asia.

🙏 Our Ask
If you work with or know teams at frontier robotics labs (humanoid companies, robotics foundation model research groups and teams), please make an intro (lucas@cortexrobot.ai) — we’d love to collaborate, thank you!

🔗 cortexrobot.ai
📩 lucas@cortexrobot.ai

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