Korea’s biggest manufacturers back Config, the TSMC of robot data - BERITAJA

Asia’s push into beingness AI is being fueled by the aforesaid manufacturing prowess that made the region a world business powerhouse. Across South Korea, Japan, China and Taiwan, manufacturing remains a cardinal pillar of economical growth. Unlike economies much heavy weighted toward services aliases software, these countries person agelong relied connected large-scale production, export-driven industries, and highly optimized proviso chains. That structural instauration is now shaping really artificial intelligence is adopted and wherever finance flows.

Which makes it peculiarly important that Config, a Seoul- and San Jose- based startup building the information furniture for robotic instauration models (RFMs), has secured backing from the task arms’ of South Korea’s biggest manufacturers.

Samsung Venture Investment led its oversubscribed $27 cardinal seed information astatine a valuation of much than $200 million, bringing Config’s full raised to $34 million. Hyundai Motor’s task limb ZER01NE Ventures, LG Tech Ventures, and SKT America, a South Korean telco giant’s VC unit, besides joined arsenic strategical investors, alongside angel investor Pieter Abbeel (co-founder of Covariant AI and a UC Berkeley professor) and financial backers including Mirae Asset Ventures, Korea Development Bank, GS Futures, Kakao Ventures, and Z Ventures.

Config was founded successful January 2025 by CEO Minjoon Seo, a erstwhile interrogator astatine Meta and main intelligence astatine Twelve Labs, on pinch 4 co-founders pinch backgrounds astatine Waymo, Google and Naver. Instead of building robots themselves, the squad is focused connected a simpler goal, providing information robots request to study and operate. They judge that amended information will beryllium cardinal to making robots much useful.

Training ample connection models is expensive, because of the computing powerfulness required to process them, but the earthy material, immense amounts of matter from crossed the internet, is easy to obtain. Teaching robots to move is simply a wholly different challenge, Seo said successful an exclusive question and reply pinch TechCrunch. Every portion of training information has to beryllium physically collected, for illustration you request the robot, the installation to tally it, and group to run it. That makes robotics AI much costly to create than software-only chatbot, according to the Seo. As companies prosecute much could robots, the costs of gathering and labeling information could emergence quickly.

Config wants to beryllium the institution that makes everyone else’s robot AI possible. The startup compares its domiciled to TSMC, a Taiwanese chipmaker that manufactures  for Apple, Nvidia, and AMD without competing pinch immoderate of them. Config intends to play a akin domiciled successful robotics by supplying the data. The attack is gaining traction arsenic ample manufacturers progressively activity to build their ain proprietary robot AI alternatively of relying wholly connected extracurricular vendors. That is the marketplace Config is betting on.

Config is already generating revenue, COO and co-founder of Config Jack Bang said. The startup’s existent customers see ample manufacturers, strategy integrators, and companies successful the agriculture and defense sectors, Bang told TechCrunch. Peers successful the abstraction see Physical Intelligence, Generalist AI and Skild AI.

Image Credits:Kate Park

Config records humans performing beingness tasks successful controlled workplace environments and successful the field. The startup operates retired of Seoul and Hanoi, wherever a workforce of about 300 handles information production. To date, it has accumulated complete 100,000 hours of quality mobility data, much than 30 times the size of AgiBot World, the largest comparable open-source dataset astatine about 3,000 hours.

Most robotics teams train AI models connected quality mobility information and past accommodate those models for a robot. Config is taking a different approach, Seo said. The institution focuses connected transforming the information earlier training originates truthful it is amended suited to the measurement robots move and interact pinch the world. Seo compared the process to connection translation. Training a exemplary connected 1 type of information and expecting it to activity seamlessly successful different setting, Seo said, is trying to thatch Korean utilizing only English-language materials.

“The information must beryllium converted, not the model. This conversion exertion is Config’s halfway method differentiator,” Seo said.

The backing will spell toward 3 priorities: scaling its information cognition successful Vietnam and Seoul toward 1 cardinal hours of collected data, increasing its endeavor level business to $10 cardinal successful ARR by the extremity of 2026, and launching a cloud-based Robot-as-a-Service merchandise that lets companies tally Config’s instauration exemplary without requiring onboard hardware.