This startup wants to pay for your email and photos to train AI — and it's on an acquisition spree

A new frontier in artificial intelligence is emerging, where your everyday digital interactions—like emails, photos, and receipts—could earn you money. Enter Mode Inc, an AI training startup that is rapidly expanding its operations through a series of strategic acquisitions. In the past year alone, Mode Inc has completed seven acquisitions, including the inbox management app Trimbox and the QR Code Reader app. These acquisitions are a part of the company’s mission to tap into the vast potential of consumer-generated data. CEO Dan Novaes emphasized the company’s focus on everyday users rather than gig workers from platforms like Mechanical Turk and Scale AI. Users can earn cash or rewards by sharing various types of data—from receipts from stores like Amazon and Walmart to data collected from wearable devices. With this new strategy, Mode Inc has expanded its user base to over 100 million monthly users. While Mode Inc is not a direct competitor to other data collection startups like Scale AI or Mercor, it is part of a growing ecosystem that compensates individuals for their data contributions, which in turn helps improve AI systems used in technologies ranging from autonomous vehicles to chatbots developed by OpenAI and Meta. Founded in 2019, Mode Inc has already distributed more than $1 billion in earnings, savings, and incentives to its users. Novaes has successfully raised over $80 million through crowdfunding, with plans to take the company public within the next two years. As the legal landscape around AI data usage evolves, Novaes believes there will be an increasing demand for user-consented data collection. He shared an interesting request from an AI lab seeking handwritten documents for training purposes. This highlights the need for vast amounts of diverse data, which Mode Inc aims to facilitate by encouraging users to contribute samples. Looking ahead, Mode Inc has ambitious plans to build a collection of niche applications that collectively can achieve massive user engagement. Novaes is also exploring the potential of an app that could leverage users' photo libraries for AI training. "There are two pathways to reach a billion monthly active users," Novaes stated. "You can develop a new social media platform, or you can acquire numerous smaller apps that each have a million users."