Asia’s push into physical AI is being fueled by the same manufacturing prowess that made the region a global industrial powerhouse. Across South Korea, Japan, China and Taiwan, manufacturing remains a central pillar of economic growth. Unlike economies more heavily weighted toward services or software, these countries have long relied on large-scale production, export-driven industries, and highly optimized supply chains. That structural foundation is now shaping how artificial intelligence is adopted and where investment flows.
Which makes it particularly significant that Config, a Seoul- and San Jose- based startup building the data layer for robotic foundation models (RFMs), has secured backing from the venture arms’ of South Korea’s biggest manufacturers.
Samsung Venture Investment led its oversubscribed $27 million seed round at a valuation of more than $200 million, bringing Config’s total raised to $35 million. Hyundai Motor’s venture arm ZER01NE Ventures, LG Tech Ventures, and SKT America, a South Korean telco giant’s VC unit, 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.
Config was founded in January 2025 by CEO Minjoon Seo, a former researcher at Meta and chief scientist at Twelve Labs, along with three co-founders with backgrounds at Waymo, Google and Naver. Instead of building robots themselves, the team is focused on a simpler goal, providing data robots need to learn and operate. They believe that better data will be key to making robots more useful.
Training large language models is expensive, because of the computing power required to process them, but the raw material, vast amounts of text from across the internet, is easy to obtain. Teaching robots to move is a completely different challenge, Seo said in an exclusive interview with TechCr …