Miju LabsThis page exists to argue with a strong intuition rather than to dismiss it.
The intuition goes: models are running out of text, physical-world competence is the obvious frontier, tradespeople hold decades of tacit diagnostic knowledge that appears nowhere in any corpus, and 1.8 million of them are reachable through unions and forums that actually work. Every clause of that is true. The conclusion does not follow, and the reason is a single number.
Human Archive pays workers $1 per hour. It raised $8.2M (Wing VC, NVP Capital, Y Combinator, with angels from OpenAI, Nvidia, Google, Mercor, AfterQuery and Meta), deploys 1,000+ headsets with tactile gloves, mocap suits and wrist cameras across "home services, hotel, and restaurant sectors" in India — against competitors paying ₹250–400/hr ($2.63–$4.20). It names no customers, only "every major lab and university" showing interest, and was rejected by both Urban Company and Pronto (TechCrunch).
That is the market price for footage of a person doing a physical task, set by a funded company with the right investors. Set it against the other end of this research: Mercor pays civil engineers $95–170/hr. The gap between $170/hr and $1/hr is the difference between selling judgement and selling pixels of somebody working, and it is the most important number in the whole enquiry.
What the data actually is
The product a lab would plausibly want is not "an electrician's opinion typed into a box". That is cheap to produce and nobody has asked for it.
It is multimodal diagnostic trajectories on real equipment: thermal images, meter readings, refrigerant pressures, waveform captures, and the sequence of hypotheses a technician forms and discards on the way to a fault. The value is in the discarded hypotheses — the same structure that makes Defensive security's malware triage traces and Senior code review's root-cause narration worth buying.
The difference is what it takes to capture one. A malware analyst detonates a public sample in a sandbox that costs nothing. A trades technician needs a jobsite, customer consent, equipment that can be broken and re-broken to specification, instrumentation, and liability cover. The artefact is identical in shape and three orders of magnitude apart in production cost.
Proof scores 2. There is no benchmark of any kind — no trades or field-service LLM benchmark was found anywhere, a clean [NOTHING FOUND] — so being visibly the best source is trivially achievable and completely worthless, because there is nobody to be visibly best in front of. The same trap Sales and GTM falls into.
Is anyone buying
Budget scores 1, the only 1 in this set, and the negative evidence is unusually complete:
- No frontier-lab job posting for trades or field-service expertise.
- No trades occupation among GDPval's 44 (OpenAI) — construction trades are explicitly outside the set.
- No trades vendor in either the 37-vendor RL-environment directory or the top-50 human-data listing (rl-list, alignlist).
- No public benchmark.
The enthusiasm around trades in 2026 is a labour-market story rather than a training-data one: data-centre construction driving electrician demand (CNBC), BlackRock's $100M skilled-trades training investment (Fortune). Both are real. Neither is a buyer for data.
Every other page in this set carries a caveat that its demand evidence is a job posting rather than a contract. This one has no job posting either. The demand case cannot be graded as weak; there is no case to grade.
The nearest thing to a buyer is the egocentric-video market, and its structure is a warning rather than a template. Claru (10,000+ contributors, 100+ cities), Luel (YC W26), Appen, Labelbox/Alignerr, Scale's Physical AI Data Engine and Meta's Ego4D (3,670 hours, 931 participants) all target household and general manipulation. None specialises in skilled trades, industrial maintenance or repair (Claru) — the specialisation is available precisely because the price does not support it.
Getting the experts
Reach scores 5, and it is the best reach in this entire atlas. This is the cruel part.
IBEW alone has roughly 887,000 members as of 2026 (Wikipedia). Add NECA and ACCA for contractors; state licence registers, which are public, searchable and jurisdiction-tagged — a verified-practitioner credential of the same quality as NASBA's CPA database (Accounting, audit and tax) or the NCEES registers (Architecture, engineering and construction); and unusually active forums where practitioners diagnose faults for each other in public: HVAC-Talk, Mike Holt Forums, r/electricians, r/HVAC, r/AskElectricians.
BLS counts electricians at $63,190/yr ($30.38/hr), 821,000 jobs and 9% growth; HVACR technicians at $61,010 ($29.33/hr), 440,900 jobs and 11% growth; industrial machinery mechanics at $64,100 ($30.82/hr), 547,300 jobs and 14% growth (BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook; no URLs were captured in the research for these three).
Everything a supply-side operator wants is here: a large growing pool, a public credential, real channels, and a $30/hr floor. It is worth sitting with how completely that fails to matter when nobody is buying — reach is a multiplier on demand, and a multiplier on zero is zero.
What it costs to run
Cost scores 1, and this is the section the whole set of pages was written to make legible.
You cannot produce a single unit of this data without capital. Not a licence, not a seat — a shop. A representative rig for diagnostic trajectories means load panels, condensing units, PLCs and industrial controls, instrumentation to capture thermal and electrical signals, a space to house it, and insurance against people deliberately breaking energised equipment. Then the recurring cost of consumables and repair.
Compare the gradient across this set:
| Niche | Capital to produce one unit | Verdict |
|---|---|---|
| Video, motion and VFX | A per-seat NLE licence | Labour business |
| Mechanical CAD and manufacturing | Optional CNC mill, five figures | Labour business, capital upgrade |
| Chip design and EDA | $80–150K per engineer per year in tool licences | Capital business |
| Life-science wet lab | A building; hundreds to thousands of dollars per experiment | Capital business |
| Trades | A shop, a rig and insurance, before the first datapoint | Capital business, no revenue |
The other capital-heavy niches at least have a buyer at the end. Here the capital comes first and the buyer never arrives.
And the ceiling is already set. At $1–4/hr for egocentric physical data, even a 20x premium for licensed-tradesman diagnostic work lands around $60–80/hr for data that costs you a rig to produce — while Architecture, engineering and construction pays $95–170/hr for a document opinion that costs you nothing.
Who is already there
Room scores 5. Nobody sells skilled-trades expertise as AI training data, confirmed against both directories.
The schema treats an empty room as an opportunity, and the score is honest on its own terms — but this page is the clearest case in the atlas for reading room and budget together rather than separately. Seven empty vertical categories across this research usually means the buyers are not there, not that seven founders missed the same idea. In Defensive security the emptiness is contradicted by a published Meta and CrowdStrike paper proving the capability gap. Here it is corroborated by every other line on the page.
Defense scores 2. Trade knowledge is genuinely tacit and genuinely durable — that part of the intuition holds. But there is no barrier to a competitor with a shop, the pool is publicly listed by every state, and whoever owns the rig owns the position. It is defensible in the way a warehouse is defensible: by whoever paid for it.
What would kill it
Physical access. No jobsite, no data. Customer premises require consent from a homeowner or facility owner who gets nothing from the exchange.
Safety and liability. Capturing diagnostic work on energised equipment for commercial resale is an insurance conversation before it is a data conversation.
Privacy. Field service happens inside homes and businesses. Every frame is somebody's property, and often somebody's family.
The comparable price. Human Archive's $1/hr is not an anomaly to be beaten. It is what a funded company with OpenAI and Nvidia angels concluded this data is worth.
The first ninety days here
There are none. This is the one niche in the atlas that should be closed rather than tested, and the argument is complete without a pilot: no demand signal of any kind, a cost base that is capital rather than labour, and a comparable market pricing the output at $1/hr.
If the physical-world thesis is what appeals, the version that survives is Mechanical CAD and manufacturing — the same instinct, the same closing of a physical loop, at five figures instead of a shop, in a domain where the buyer already pays $65–80/hr. See Robotics teleoperation and physical-world data for where physical-world data money is actually going, and When to stop for the general discipline of writing a niche off before spending on it.
Where the record is thin
The [NOTHING FOUND] results are negatives from directory searches and job-board queries, which are weaker instruments than they appear — a small vendor or a quiet lab contract could exist unlisted.
BLS figures for all three occupations arrive without captured URLs. The IBEW membership number is from Wikipedia. Human Archive's $1/hr comes from one TechCrunch report and the company disputes nothing publicly, but no worker was interviewed independently. And the argument that a trades benchmark would find no audience is an inference from absence — if a robotics-focused lab funds a field-service eval next year, budget here moves off 1, and everything else on this page still stands.