As robotics has superior, business has steadily adopted extra robots to automate away many sorts of grunt work. Greater than 540,000 new industrial robots have been put in worldwide in 2023, taking the variety of complete industrial robots energetic to above 4 million, per IFR.
Industrial robots usually excel at repetitive duties, however they discover it difficult to carry out exact duties, deal with delicate supplies, and regulate to altering situations — a robotic in a restaurant’s kitchen would get in the way in which greater than be useful, for instance. That’s the reason many industrial processes are nonetheless handbook.
South Korean startup RLWRLD goals to resolve this drawback with a foundational AI mannequin that it has constructed particularly for robotics by combining giant language fashions with conventional robotics software program. The corporate says this mannequin will allow robots to make fast and agile actions and carry out some quantity of “logical reasoning” as nicely.
“Using RLWRLD’s foundation model, processes that require a lot of manual work can be completely automated by learning and copying human expertise, making work environments more efficient,” Jung-Hee Ryu, founder and CEO of RLWRLD, mentioned in an unique interview with TechCrunch.
The startup is now popping out of stealth with 21 billion KRW (about $14.8 million) in seed funding. The spherical was led by enterprise capital agency Hashed, and Mirae Asset Enterprise Funding and World Mind additionally invested.
Notably, RLWRLD has attracted an extended listing of massive strategic traders — Ana Group, PKSHA, Mitsui Chemical, Shimadzu and KDDI from Japan; LG Electronics and SK Telecom from Korea; and Amber Manufacturing from India.
RLWRLD mentioned the seed funding will probably be used to fund proof-of-concept tasks with its strategic traders; safe computing infrastructure like GPUs, buy robots, and gadgets to gather intensive information; and rent high analysis expertise. The startup can even use the brand new cash to develop superior hand actions involving five-fingers — a functionality that’s not but been demonstrated by its opponents like Tesla, Determine AI and 1X, Ryu mentioned.
Ryu mentioned RLWRLD can also be working with its strategic traders to discover methods to automate completely different human-centric workflows utilizing its AI mannequin. They’re collectively getting ready a humanoid-based autonomous motion demonstration, scheduled for later this yr, Ryu mentioned. As well as, the corporate is working to develop a platform that may assist numerous sorts of robots, together with industrial, collaborative, autonomous cell robots and humanoids.
Based in 2024, RLWRLD is Ryu’s third startup. His second startup, Olaworks, was acquired by Intel in 2012, and ultimately turned Intel’s Korea R&D middle inside its pc imaginative and prescient division. And in 2015, he based a startup accelerator, Future Play, that focuses on deep tech firms.
When requested what impressed him to begin a brand new firm once more, Ryu mentioned he observed how shortly AI startups have been rising in quantity within the U.S, Europe and China, whereas comparable AI startups in Korea and Japan have been comparatively absent.
He spoke with over 30 AI professors from Korea and Japan about their challenges — every little thing from the shortage of infrastructure like information and GPUs, and the obstacles that discouraged them to launch a enterprise — and the alternatives out there.
“I determined that it would be strategically beneficial to prioritize robotics foundation models (RFM) over the technologically saturated field of LLMs, capitalizing on Korea and Japan’s notable global strengths in manufacturing,” he mentioned.
Quickly afterwards, he introduced on board six professors from top-ranked establishments in South Korea, together with KAIST, SNU, and POSTECH, together with their analysis groups, to launch RLWRLD.
RLWRLD isn’t alone in tackling this drawback. Startups like Skild AI and Bodily Intelligence are constructing related foundational fashions for robotics, as are bigger corporations like Tesla, Google DeepMind, and Nvidia.
However Ryu believes his startup has a superb begin, because it already has the AI and robotics consultants it must develop foundational fashions for robotics, in addition to humanoid robots with excessive diploma of freedom (DoF).
“Additionally, [such companies] typically rely on low-DoF robots such as two-fingered grippers. RLWRLD has already secured a high-DoF reference robot, and therefore expects superior performance outcomes,” he mentioned.
Ryu additionally mentioned that due to its strategic traders, RLWRLD can shortly collect beneficial information from manufacturing websites situated close by. In 2024, a report indicated that Japan and South Korea collectively accounted for 9.2% of worldwide manufacturing manufacturing.
RLWRLD goals to generate income as early as this yr by proof-of-concept (PoC) tasks and collaboration demonstrations with strategic companions.
The startup’s long-term purpose is to cater to factories, logistics facilities, and retail shops, and even robots that can be utilized in home environments to assist with family chores. Within the meantime, the precedence is to focus on industrials since they’re prepared to pay essentially the most and have sturdy demand for automation.
The startup has 13 staff.
