As robotics advanced, the industry has consistently adopted more robots to automate many types of hard work. More than 540,000 new industrial robots were installed worldwide in 2023, receiving the number of total industrial robots active to over 4 million for IFR.
Industrial robots usually excel in repeated tasks, but they consider it challenging to perform accurate tasks, treat delicate materials, and adapt to change conditions – a robot in a restaurant’s kitchen would take the road more than be useful, for example. That is why many industrial processes are still manual.
The beginning of South Korea Rlwrld aims to solve this problem with a basic model that has built specifically for robotics by combining large linguistic models with traditional robotics software. The company says this model will allow robots to make fast and agile movements and perform an amount of “logical reasoning” as well.
“Using the RLWRLD Foundation model, processes that require a lot of manual work can be fully automated by learning and copying human expertise, making the work environments more efficient,” said Jung-Hee Ryu, founder and CEO of RLWRLD, in an exclusive interview with Techcrunch.
The start is now stealing from 21 billion KRW (about $ 14.8 million) in seed financing. The round was led by the Hashed Entrepreneurship Capital Firm, and Mira Assset Venture Investment and Global Brain also invested.
In particular, Rlwrld has drawn a long list of large strategic investors – Ana Group, PCSH, Mitsui Chemical, Shimadzu and KDDI from Japan; LG Electronics and SK Telecom from Korea; and amber production from India.
Rlwrld said that seed funds will be used to fund the concept test projects with its strategic investors; Secure calculation infrastructure such as GPUs, purchase robots and equipment to collect extensive data; and hire high search talent. Starting will also use new money to develop advanced hand movements that include five fingers-a skill that has not yet been demonstrated by its competitors such as Tesla, Figure AI and 1x, Ryu said.
Ryu said Rlwrld is also working with his strategic investors to explore ways to automate various human work flows using his model. They are together preparing a demonstration of autonomous humanoid -based action planned for later this year, Ryu said. Moreover, the company is working to develop a platform that can support different types of robots, including robots and industrial, collaborative, autonomous, autonomous humanoids and humanoids.
Founded in 2024, Rlwrld is the third beginning of Ryu. Its second start, Olaworks, was purchased by Intel in 2012, and eventually became the R&D Center of Intel Korea within its Computer Vision Division. And in 2015, he founded a beginner accelerator, Future Play, which focuses on deep technology companies.
When asked what inspired him to start a new company again, Ryu said he noticed how quickly the beginnings were growing in the number in JB, Europe and China, while the comparable beginnings in Korea and Japan were relatively missing.
He spoke with over 30 professors from Korea and Japan about their challenges – everything from the lack of infrastructure such as data and GPUs, and the obstacles that discouraged them to start an enterprise – and the possibilities available.
“I determined that it would be a strategic useful to prioritize the models of the Robotics Foundation (RFM) over the technologically saturated field, capitalizing in Korea and Japan’s global strengths in production,” he said.
Shortly thereafter, he brought six professors from high -ranking institutions in South Korea, including Kaist, SNU and Postech, along with their research teams to begin RLWRLD.
Rlwrld is not just in dealing with this problem. Beginnings like Skild he and physical intelligence are building similar basic models for robotics, such as the largest firms like Tesla, Google Deepmind and Nvidia.
But Ryu believes that his beginning has a good start, as he already has experts and robotics he needs to develop basic models for robotics as well as high degree of freedom (DOF).
“Moreover, (such companies) usually rely on low-dof robots as two-fingered grippers. Rlwrld has already provided a high reference robot, and therefore expects superior performance results,” he said.
Ryu also said that thanks to his strategic investors, RLWRLD can quickly collect valuable data from production countries located nearby. In 2024, one report showed that Japan and South Korea collectively accounted for 9.2% of production production worldwide.
RLWRLD aims to generate revenue this year through concept test projects (POC) and demonstrations of cooperation with strategic partners.
The long -term goal of starting is to take care of factories, logistical centers and retail shops, even robots that can be used indoors to help in homework. In the meantime, the advantage is to aim for industrials as they are willing to pay more and have a strong demand for automation.
The start has 13 employees.
