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

Mode Inc CEO Dan Novaes and tech chief Kiran Panesar.

Mode Inc

The next wave of AI needs your photos, receipts, and emails to get smarter. One startup wants to help you get paid for it, and it's on a corporate shopping spree.AI training startup Mode Inc has acquired two consumer applications, bringing its total buyouts in the past year to seven.The company bought Trimbox, an inbox management app, and QR Code Reader, a code scanning app."We're not really focused on just going after the Mechanical Turk or the Outlier/Scale AI gig workers," Mode Inc CEO Dan Novaes told Business Insider, naming pay-per-gig contracting sites. "It's really about everyday consumers and doing the things that they do every single day."These include uploading receipts from Amazon or Walmart purchases, streaming data, and wearable device data. The deals expand Mode Inc's portfolio to include more than 100 million monthly users, who turn in such data for cash or rewards.While not a direct competitor, the company is part of a slew of startups such as Scale AI, Mercor, and Handshake that pay hundreds of thousands of contractors around the world to collect and label data. This data is used by companies to help improve everything from self-driving cars to OpenAI and Meta's chatbots.Noaves said he founded Mode Inc in 2019 for people to get paid for the time they spend on their devices and the data they generate.