Config, a Seoul- and San Jose-based startup building data infrastructure for robotic AI, announced in May 2026 that it has raised a $27 million seed round led by Samsung Venture Investment, bringing its total funding to $35 million. The round was oversubscribed at a valuation exceeding $200 million.
Hyundai Motor’s venture arm ZER01NE Ventures, LG Tech Ventures, and SKT America also joined as strategic 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.
Founded in January 2025 by CEO Minjoon Seo, a former Meta researcher and former chief scientist at Twelve Labs, Config is not building robots. Instead, it supplies the training data that robot AI systems need to learn physical tasks. Its three co-founders bring backgrounds from Waymo, Google, and Naver. The company compares its role to that of TSMC — providing a foundational service to robot developers without competing with them directly.
Collecting robot training data is significantly more resource-intensive than gathering text for large language models, Seo told TechCrunch. Every data point must be physically captured using robots, facilities, and human operators. Config records humans performing physical tasks in studios and in the field, operating out of Seoul and Hanoi with a workforce of nearly 300. 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.
Config’s technical approach centers on converting data before model training, rather than adapting models after the fact. “The data must be converted, not the model,” Seo said. “This conversion technology is Config’s core technical differentiator.”
The startup is already generating revenue from customers in manufacturing, system integration, agriculture, and defense. Config plans to use the new funding to scale its data operation toward one million hours of collected data, grow its enterprise platform to $10 million in ARR by end of 2027, and launch a cloud-based Robot-as-a-Service product.
Source: TechCrunch