ISLAMABAD: World Context, a Pakistani robotics data startup, hosted its inaugural hackathon at the University of California, Berkeley. The event brought together 13 teams to develop projects using the company’s datasets, aiming to strengthen artificial intelligence and technology ties between Pakistan and the United States.
Founded in Pakistan earlier this year, World Context records how workers perform physical tasks in factories and other real-world settings, converting these recordings into datasets used to train robots.
A hackathon is a short, intensive event where teams collaborate to build and demonstrate technology projects around a specific problem or dataset.
“The talent on display at Berkeley showed how advanced the industry is in the US, and that there are tremendous opportunities to learn from and partner with US institutions and companies,” said World Context founder and CEO Sherdil Ali Khan. “We can bring these learnings back to Pakistan to improve the state of technology there as well.”
The event, held in partnership with the student organization Blockchain at Berkeley, was sponsored by Google Gemini, ElevenLabs, The Hackathon Company, Lovable, Praxis Robotics, and UC Berkeley Startup, according to World Context.
Participants competed across hardware, software, and visualization tracks using datasets provided by the Pakistani company, with a total of $4,500 in cash prizes awarded.
Sortbot, a project aimed at developing robots capable of sorting different types of objects, won the hardware track. Meanwhile, Reconstructors won the software category with a project focused on recreating World Context’s data in the physical world. The same team also won the visualization track with a simulation.
World Context collects human demonstration data—recordings of people carrying out physical tasks that teach AI systems how to perform those tasks in real-world environments.
The company utilizes proprietary sensors, wearable gloves, and head-mounted cameras to record workers performing industrial tasks, capturing details such as hand and finger movements and the pressure applied during repetitive work.
World Context is currently collecting data from approximately 8,000 workers in Pakistan across the textile, automotive, logistics, and other manufacturing sectors, selling these datasets to robotics companies in the United States and China.
Khan has previously noted that Pakistan’s large manufacturing workforce and reliance on skilled manual production could position the country as a key player in the global robotics industry by supplying the real-world data needed to train machines.
According to the Pakistan Labour Force Survey 2024-25, manufacturing accounts for 14.8 percent of total employment in Pakistan and 20.7 percent of urban employment.
World Context selected UC Berkeley for its first hackathon due to the university’s strengths in robotics and engineering, as well as the opportunity to collaborate with its students and researchers.
Khan stated that the projects developed during the event demonstrated that students found innovative ways to use the company’s human demonstration datasets that World Context itself had not anticipated.
The company plans to partner with universities on similar events in the future as it explores closer collaborations with academic institutions.
