Asia's manufacturing might has always been about making things at scale - cars, chips, ships, and now, apparently, robot data. Config, a startup based in Seoul and San Jose that builds the data layer for robotic foundation models (RFMs), has raised an oversubscribed $27 million seed round led by Samsung Venture Investment, with strategic backing from Hyundai Motor's ZER01NE Ventures, LG Tech Ventures, and SKT America. The round values Config at over $200 million and brings its total funding to $34 million. Angel investor Pieter Abbeel, co-founder of Covariant AI and a UC Berkeley professor, also chipped in, alongside financial backers including Mirae Asset Ventures, Korea Development Bank, GS Futures, Kakao Ventures, and Z Ventures.
Founded in January 2025 by CEO Minjoon Seo - a former Meta researcher and chief scientist at Twelve Labs - along with four co-founders from Waymo, Google, and Naver, Config isn't building robots themselves. Instead, they're focused on a simpler goal: providing the data robots need to learn and operate. Because, as it turns out, teaching a robot to move is a lot harder than teaching a chatbot to generate plausible-sounding nonsense. Every piece of training data has to be physically collected - you need the robot, the facility, and people to operate it. That makes robotics AI more costly to develop than a software-only chatbot, according to Seo.
Config compares its role to TSMC, the Taiwanese chipmaker that manufactures for Apple, Nvidia, and AMD without competing with any of them. The startup aims to play a similar role in robotics by supplying the data. The approach is gaining traction as large manufacturers increasingly seek to build their own proprietary robot AI instead of relying entirely on outside vendors. That is the market Config is betting on - and it's already generating revenue, according to COO and co-founder Jack Bang. Current customers include large manufacturers, system integrators, and companies in the agriculture and defense sectors. Peers in the space include Physical Intelligence, Generalist AI, and Skild AI.
Config records humans performing physical tasks in controlled studio environments and in the field. The startup operates out of Seoul and Hanoi, where a workforce of nearly 300 handles data production. To date, it has accumulated over 100,000 hours of human motion data - more than 30 times the size of AgiBot World, the largest comparable open-source dataset at roughly 3,000 hours. But Config isn't just hoarding data; it's transforming it. Most robotics teams train AI models on human motion data and then adapt those models for a robot. Config takes a different approach, converting the data before training begins so it's better suited to the way robots move and interact with the world. Seo compared the process to language translation: training a model on one type of data and expecting it to work seamlessly in another setting is like trying to teach Korean using only English-language materials. "The data must be converted, not the model. This conversion technology is Config's core technical differentiator," Seo said.
The funding will go toward three priorities: scaling its data operation in Vietnam and Seoul toward one million hours of collected data, growing its enterprise platform business to $10 million in annual recurring revenue by the end of 2026, and launching a cloud-based Robot-as-a-Service product that lets companies run Config's foundation model without requiring onboard hardware. Because nothing says "industrial revolution" like renting robot brains by the hour.