A 38-engineer Sydney Pyrmont AV startup (Pirrama Road address, Series B raised early 2025, building ego-motion driving policy for a Tier-1 OEM in Melbourne) had 12,400 raw egocentric driving clips sitting in cold storage — front-camera + LiDAR + IMU + radar, 30 fps, 9-second windows, captured across Sydney CBD, the M5 East tunnel, and the Eastern Suburbs school run. The autonomy lead needed every clip labelled to the OEM ASIL-B traceability spec by the end of sprint 14, eleven calendar days out. The internal labelling pod (4 contractors in Brisbane) was running at 280 clips per day. Math says they ship 3,080 of 12,400 by the deadline.

This post is the worked example of what the AB7 Whitefield robotics-data pod actually ran, what it cost the Pyrmont startup ($0.62 per labelled clip, all-in), and what the ASIL-B evidence trail looks like when the dataset gets handed to the OEM.

What the deployment actually looks like

A 14-person AB7 Whitefield pod out of the Bengaluru office (Whitefield, ITPL Main Road, 4 km from EPIP Zone) — 11 annotators trained on multi-modal AV data, 2 QA reviewers ISO 26262-aware, 1 named ops lead (Ramya, CSCP-certified, four years on Waymo-spec data prep at a prior vendor). Tooling stack: Scale Nucleus for the dataset orchestration, CVAT 2.7 for the 2D + 3D cuboid annotation, Foxglove Studio for ROS bag inspection on the LiDAR + IMU + radar synchronisation, and a custom traceability ledger writing every annotator decision to a Git-backed audit log signed against the OEM ISO 26262 process ID.

Cost: $0.62 per labelled clip for the full multi-modal pass (front camera 2D bbox + LiDAR 3D cuboid + behaviour-tag triplet + ASIL-B trace ID). 12,400 clips × $0.62 = $7,688 fixed-scope, 11-day delivery. AU pricing is A$11,200. The internal Brisbane pod all-in burn rate worked out to A$1.72 per clip (4 contractors × A$120/day × 11 days = A$5,280; output 3,080 clips at most). Whitefield delivers 4× the dataset for 65% of the per-clip cost.

What is in scope per clip:

Front-camera 2D bounding boxes on 7 object classes — vehicle, pedestrian, cyclist, traffic light, road sign, lane marker, ground (drivable / non-drivable mask)
LiDAR 3D cuboid annotation — same 7 classes, time-synced to the camera at 30 fps with sub-100ms drift tolerance verified per clip
IMU + radar cross-check — annotator flags any clip where IMU and radar disagree on ego-vehicle yaw rate by more than 2°/sec
Behaviour-tag triplet — the ego-vehicle intended manoeuvre, the surrounding scene context, and the rare-event marker
ASIL-B trace ID — every annotation decision gets a SHA-256 hash of the (annotator-id, timestamp, decision-vector, tool-version) tuple, written to the Git audit log

The 11-day delivery window

Day 1-2 (Wed-Thu). Data-processing addendum + IP NDA signed. SSO into the buyer Scale Nucleus workspace provisioned to all 14 named pod members. Calibration round on 60 representative clips (20 CBD, 15 M5 tunnel, 15 Eastern Suburbs school run, 10 night-time wet-road). Inter-annotator agreement (IAA) on the 7 object classes: 94.2%. IAA on the 14-tag rare-event markers: 79.4% — below the 85% threshold. Two rare-event tags (pedestrian-from-occlusion, cyclist-on-shoulder) get a tighter definition pass on a Friday morning call with the buyer autonomy lead. Re-tested. Rare-event IAA climbs to 88.1%.

Day 3-9 (Fri-Thu). Production labelling at 1,520 clips/day net of QA rework. The 11 annotators on the camera + LiDAR + behaviour-tag pass. The 2 QA reviewers on 100% double-review of rare-event flags + 20% double-review of standard 7-class annotations. The Brisbane contractor pod runs in parallel on a separate 1,200-clip subset for the buyer Series C data room side-by-side.

Day 10-11 (Fri-Sat). Final QA pass on 62,000 annotation slots (12,400 clips × 5 attribute slots). 10% blind re-label sample shows 1.9% disagreement; 71% of disagreements are camera-bbox tightness within 4 pixels; 357 slots (0.58%) get corrected with chained audit log entries. Handoff: 87 GB dataset ZIP via buyer S3, ASIL-B trace ledger as a signed Git bundle. ISO 26262 audit-readiness confirmed in writing.

The Brisbane vs Whitefield side-by-side

The buyer ran a deliberate side-by-side: 1,200 clips to the Brisbane internal pod, the same 1,200 clips to AB7 Whitefield. The numbers:

Metric	Brisbane internal	AB7 Whitefield
Throughput (clips/day)	280	1,520
All-in cost per clip	A$1.72	A$0.96 (US$0.62)
Camera-bbox IAA	91.8%	94.2%
LiDAR 3D cuboid IAA	86.0%	91.7%
Rare-event tag IAA	73.5%	88.1%
ASIL-B audit log present	No	Yes (SHA-256 chained)
Delivery slip	11.4 days late	On-time, day 11 17:00 IST

The Brisbane pod isn’t bad. The Brisbane pod is one ops lead short of being audit-ready — there is no ISO 26262-aware QA layer, and the rare-event taxonomy needed a tighter definition pass that nobody had time to run. AB7 value here is not “cheaper offshore labellers”. The value is the named ops lead who has shipped this exact format before, and the ASIL-B trace ledger that the OEM safety engineer can audit.

What this is not

This is not “anyone with a CVAT licence can do this.” Egocentric multi-modal AV data needs an ops lead who has seen Waymo-spec, Cruise-spec, or Wayve-spec data formats before. There are roughly 40 of those people in India. AB7 employs 3 of them.

This is not “label everything, ship to the OEM, hope for the best.” The 14-tag rare-event taxonomy got re-defined on day 2 because IAA was below threshold. Most vendors would have shipped on day 11 with the bad taxonomy and let the OEM find out at sprint 16.

This is not for buyers without an OEM-side safety engineer. The ASIL-B trace ledger only matters if there is someone on the buyer side who knows what to do with it. AB7 will say so on the scoping call.

What happens in the first 60-minute call

Ashok Benial (founder of AB7) takes the scoping call. Three things: (1) the actual scope and timeline — clip count, modality mix, OEM traceability spec, deadline; AB7 returns the per-clip price and throughput math. (2) The taxonomy preview — Ramya joins (14:30 Sydney = 09:00 IST), walks a 10-clip pilot of the buyer existing taxonomy, names the 2-3 definitions she would tighten before scaling. (3) The deployment plan — named pod members, ISO 26262 training certs, IP NDA terms, cutover Monday.

Book the 60-minute scoping call