We believe that better ways of sharing value can drive greater value creation.
Inspired by UBI (Universal Basic Income), we care not only about how the wealth generated by technology is ultimately shared, but also about how people can help create it and what they can gain from their contributions.
When technological progress brings tangible benefits to people’s lives, they have a more direct reason to contribute their experience, skills, and creativity to help it advance. Sharing prosperity is not just an outcome of growth. It can also help drive growth itself.
UBL (Universal Basic Layer) aims to build this kind of economic infrastructure for the age of robotics: turning people’s lived experience into robot capabilities, rewarding contributors, and enabling those rewards to support broader participation and value creation. In this way, technological progress and prosperity across society can reinforce one another.
This vision begins with a community of contributors.
At UBL, we want people to be seen as more than “people who sell their data.” They are members of a community, helping build the future of robotics and earning rewards in the process. Making robots more capable and opening up more possibilities in their own lives are aspirations this community shares.
Their experience helps robots learn to interact with the real world, while the rewards they earn create a tangible connection between the growth of the robotics industry and their own lives. Those rewards can provide resources for a better life. They can also mean more choice: learning a new skill, trying out a long-held idea, making time for the people they care about, or having more freedom to pursue the life they truly want.
This connection matters just as much to the industry. When people’s futures are tied to the industry’s growth, making robots more capable becomes a shared aspiration for more people. Ongoing rewards can attract more participants, bringing richer data that more closely reflects real life. Valuable data, in turn, can support improvements in robot capabilities, open up new applications and demand, and create the conditions for further participation and rewards.
That is the cycle we hope to build and continually strengthen. We want greater productivity from robots to create opportunities for more people to live in prosperity and freedom, while their pursuit of a better life becomes a driving force for progress in robotics.
Give Data Supply the Growth Potential of a Consumer Product
To bring more people in, participation must first feel natural.
EgoClip is UBL’s first product and an entry point for people to become part of this future. We designed it as a wearable device that fits naturally into everyday outfits: 4 cm in diameter, weighing no more than 100 grams, and supporting 8+ hours of continuous recording. Users can rent the device, with less than $20 needed to get started.
Paired with UBL’s software algorithms, EgoClip can automatically identify and extract segments of recorded footage that have value for robot training, turning everyday activities captured from a first-person perspective into data robots can learn from.
This means participants do not have to plan their activities around data collection tasks or deliberately stage and repeat a set of actions. They can wear EgoClip while cooking, tidying up, and going about their lives as usual, leaving the algorithms to select the useful footage.
Taking part does not have to mean taking on another job. The things people already do can become a way to contribute and earn rewards.
This product experience also reflects how we are rethinking growth in data supply.
In collection models that rely on expensive professional equipment and centralized teams, expansion often means adding devices, assembling teams, setting up collection sites, and repeating those investments for the next setting. Growth in data supply depends largely on how quickly the collection operation itself can expand.
EgoClip takes a different path. It puts data collection capabilities in the hands of ordinary people, allowing data to be generated in the places where they already live and work. Our approach combines a lower barrier to participation, a more natural user experience, and sharing and word of mouth among members, so data supply can grow as more users join.
Scale comes from more people choosing to participate. Diversity comes from the different lives they already lead.
Different homes, objects, habits, and everyday environments all have the potential to be represented in the data. For robotics teams, this means access to a broader range of real-world scenarios. It also offers a way to reduce the cost of assembling new data collection teams to cover each additional type of setting.
We believe that, as AI and robotics continue to evolve, data supply with lasting value must be able to scale, reach new settings, and provide experience that is useful for training. Achieving this requires learning from the design and growth strategies of consumer products: giving people a reason to start using the product, to keep participating, and to introduce it to others.
That is why EgoClip’s design goes beyond recording.
For members, it can be a badge, an accessory they want to wear every day, a sign of belonging to the UBL community, and a shared symbol that helps them recognize one another. We want it to say not just “I’m collecting data,” but also “I’m helping build the future of robotics.”
This sense of identity connects the community and the product. The product makes participation easy; the community makes continued participation meaningful. Members bring new life experiences, and they can also bring new members.
Our team has always taken a consumer-product approach to building UBL. We care about what the device can capture, but just as much about why people would want to wear it, why they would stay involved, and why they would invite others to join.
Turning a production tool into a consumer product people want to use is the starting point for EgoClip’s design and the core of UBL’s approach to expanding data supply. Our goal is to expand the sources of data for embodied AI beyond a limited set of collection sites to encompass a broader, more diverse range of real-life settings.
Our Team
NickCo-founder & CEO
Nick is a Gen Z serial entrepreneur who studied computer science at Boston University. He previously founded an AI data company that delivered more than 100,000 data samples to leading research labs around the world. He also built a consumer product that generated 10M+ in traffic, bringing hands-on experience in both data delivery and consumer-product growth.
BernardCo-founder & COO
Bernard previously worked as a Global Project Manager at Bosch and an AI product manager at Microsoft. He has managed $2 million in orders and has experience in AI products and business operations.
Join Us in Creating This Future
UBL brings together two equally important questions: how robots can gain the real-world experience they need to improve, and how the people who contribute that experience can gain more opportunities as the technology advances.
We look forward to connecting with robotics companies, research teams, organizations, and individuals who share this vision. Whether you are interested in exploring applications of real-world data together or finding ways for more people to participate and benefit, we welcome you to help build this future.
With UBL, let’s make robots more capable and give people more choices.
Let’s talk.
We’d love to hear what you’re working on.