Mode Inc buys Trimbox and QR Code Reader to harvest consented training data

AI data startup Mode Inc acquired inbox tool Trimbox and QR Code Reader, bringing its total acquisitions over the past year to seven and pushing its reach to 100M monthly users. The company pays everyday consumers cash or rewards in exchange for streaming, wearable, receipt, and inbox data used to train AI models. CEO Dan Novaes argues the next wave of training data will require consented signals from real consumers, not gig workers on platforms like Scale AI or Mercor. The rollup strategy bets that consolidating consumer apps into a single consent layer will be valuable as labs hunt for proprietary post-scrape datasets.

View full digest for June 17, 2026