Teparobotics (CEO Park Jeong-hyeok), a startup developing physical AI for industrial robots, announced on the 5th that it has attracted 2 billion won in pre-A series investment.
This investment was participated by follow-up investor Future Play and new investors IBK Venture Investment and Saneun Capital.
Tepa Robotics, founded in 2023, is an industrial robotics startup. Co-founder and CTO Baek Jong-hyun previously worked at the Korean branch of FANUC, the world's leading industrial robot manufacturer, where he was responsible for controlling and programming multi-joint robots. CEO Park Jeong-hyeok holds a Ph.D. in artificial intelligence from the University of Tokyo. The company has been applying physical AI technology to industrial robots, aiming for "efficient factory automation."
Physical AI, a type of artificial intelligence that moves and performs tasks in real-world environments, is considered a next-generation AI that goes beyond image and voice recognition and text and image generation. At CES 2025, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang projected the physical AI industry to be worth approximately $50 trillion (approximately 700 trillion won) by 2025 and identified robotics as a key future strategy for the company.
Tepa Robotics is applying physical AI to industrial robots, of which approximately 600,000 units are distributed worldwide annually, as its core platform. While industrial robots feature high-reliability, mass-production-oriented hardware, their closed nature and complex control environments make physical AI research and development challenging.
CEO Park Jeong-hyeok stated, "Securing real-world data is paramount in the development of physical AI." He added, "We fine-tuned the open-source Robotics Foundation Model (RFM) based on 800,000 real-world data sets we collected ourselves, verifying its validity. We are currently applying our own models trained on this data to industrial robots and are in discussions with customers about deploying them in the field."
"Industrial robots must perfectly handle exceptional situations in high-speed, high-precision environments," said Jeon A-ram, a senior analyst at Futureplay, who led the investment. "Tepa Robotics possesses a deep understanding of industrial domains and a proprietary data generation pipeline, making them a rare team capable of implementing physical AI in real-world mass production environments." He added, "They possess core technologies that can compete with global big tech companies, so their future growth potential is significant."
You must be logged in to post a comment.