Config Raises $27M Seed, Targets 1M Hours of Robot Data
SkimNews Take
The collective backing from major manufacturers suggests a pre-competitive recognition that standardized, high-quality training data is a foundational bottleneck for the entire Korean robotics industry.
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- Config raised $27 million in a seed round led by Samsung Venture Investment, bringing total funding to $35 million at a valuation above $200 million.
- Hyundai Motor’s ZER01NE Ventures joined the round as a strategic investor alongside LG Technology Ventures and SKT America.
- Config has amassed over 100,000 hours of human motion data, more than 30 times the size of the largest comparable open‑source dataset (AgiBot World, ~3,000 hours).
- Config plans to scale its data collection to 1 million hours in Seoul and Vietnam, grow its enterprise platform to $10 million ARR by 2027, and launch a cloud robot‑as‑a‑service product.
- Minjoon Seo, former Meta researcher and chief scientist at TwelveLabs, leads Config’s founding team, which also includes ex‑Waymo, Google, and Naver engineers.
- Config already generates revenue from large manufacturers, system integrators, and customers in agriculture and defense.
- Config’s core technical differentiator is its data conversion technology that adapts human motion data for robot training, likened to language translation.
Why it matters: The $27 million round lets Config scale its motion‑data pipeline to a million hours and launch a cloud robot‑as‑a‑service platform, giving Korean manufacturers a dedicated, in‑house data source for robot AI and reducing reliance on external providers. It also positions Config as the TSMC of robotics data, potentially reshaping the supply chain for robot AI development.
