Waffle Video wasn’t born in a Silicon Valley boardroom. It was born on film sets, in audition rooms, and in the hustle of the creator gig economy. As filmmakers, we know the feast-or-famine cycle of the creative life. When the AI wave arrived at the same time as the Actors strike brought Hollywood to a standstill, we found gig work that kept us afloat: helping train the new AI models.

But we saw a systemic flaw. We would spend an entire day creating valuable training data and get paid for our time. Meanwhile, that data would be sold and licensed again and again to multiple companies. We would never see another dollar. In the film industry, you get revenue share from the performance of your work. Why not apply that same idea to the performance of your data?

We see our creators as artists producing micro-works: well-crafted, high-quality training data that fuels an ecosystem generating enormous value. The people who create that value deserve to share in it. So we built Waffle Video to ensure that as this technology rises, it lifts the entire creative community with it.

We see a feedback loop where creators are paid to improve the very AI tools they themselves will use. By crowdsourcing diverse video from creators around the world, we are teaching AI to see the world as it truly is: messy, beautiful, and human.