Vallum Labs

White paper · v0 · September 2026

Vallum Labs collects consent-cleared, action-labeled, first-person video of real outdoor manual work and licenses it to robotics and world-model labs. Now collecting in the Western Cape, South Africa. September 2026 to January 2027.

Team

Founded in 2026 by Jaiyen Shetty. Grew up farming in Fresno, California. Computer science and business at Berkeley. Previously at Meta, the UN, the Gates Foundation and Amplitude. Based in Cape Town through January 2027, then the next region.

Hardware

Head and chest mounted iPhone rigs, four in the field. Monocular RGB at 1920x1080, 30 fps, HEVC at capture, camera settings locked for the whole shift. Not in v0: IMU, depth, wrist cameras, per-phone intrinsics. Each of those is a hardware decision that waits for a buyer to ask for it.

Operations

Workers wear rigs during their normal paid shifts on commercial farms. Nobody is filmed doing anything they would not be doing anyway. Current tasks, Southern Hemisphere spring and summer:

  • Valencia orange picking, Citrusdal and Piketberg, through October
  • Blueberry picking, George, Paarl and Wellington, October to November
  • Strawberry picking, Stellenbosch, September to December
  • Vine suckering and shoot thinning, from October

Next verticals: construction, mining, forestry.

Annotation

Schema v0 follows Ego4D and Ego-Exo4D conventions so any lab can read it on sight: timestamped narrations at 8 to 13 per minute, verb and noun action segments per hand, and pre, point-of-no-return and post critical frames with hand and object boxes propagated with SAM 2. Each segment also carries the Gemini Robotics 2 ER benchmark fields (progress bucket, critical-moment timestamp, success or failure with a fault code). Delivery is one Ego4D-shaped JSON per clip, plus a datasheet, verb and noun lists, consent summary and lineage manifest per batch. Send us your schema before we film and we map it onto this instead of rebuilding.

Evaluation

Every seventh clip of every session is held out, annotated to the same schema, and never delivered or shown. Labs can score policies against it. Outdoor manual work has no sim-to-real benchmark yet. This is the start of one.

Datasets

Outdoor-20
Valencia citrus harvest, Western Cape, 20 curated hours
Oct 2026
Outdoor-200
Citrus, blueberries, strawberries, vines, 200 hours
Feb 2027
Outdoor-2K
Agriculture and construction, 2,000 hours
2027

Datasets are licensed. Research groups get gated samples first.

Farms

We pay your crew, blur every face, and send you a picking report and a three-minute first-person training film within a week of the shoot. The footage never carries your farm's name.

Researchers and labs

If you train on human video and your corpus has no outdoor work in it, we fill that gap to your spec. Tell us the fields you need before we film. Footage cannot be reshot to a different schema. Paid pilots run 20 to 40 curated hours, delivered with a datasheet and held-out scores.

Write to jaiyen_shetty@berkeley.edu.

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