Config raises $27M seed from Samsung, Hyundai, and LG to build robotics data infrastructure
Tags AI · Hardware · Infrastructure
Config, a Seoul- and San Jose-based startup building the data layer for robotics foundation models, raised $27 million in an oversubscribed seed round at a valuation over $200 million on May 11. Samsung Venture Investment led the round, with strategic participation from Hyundai's ZER01NE Ventures, LG Technology Ventures, and SKT America. Angel investor Pieter Abbeel (Covariant co-founder, UC Berkeley professor) also participated. Founded in January 2025 by former Meta researcher Minjoon Seo, Config 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. The company operates data production facilities in Seoul and Hanoi with nearly 300 employees. Funding will target scaling to 1 million hours of data, growing the enterprise platform to $10 million ARR by end of 2027, and launching a Robot-as-a-Service cloud product.
Technical significance
Config's 'TSMC of robot data' thesis — that the critical bottleneck in robotics is not the model but the training data — is validated by the strategic investment from three of Korea's largest manufacturers. The 100,000-hour dataset at 30x the size of the largest open-source alternative creates a significant moat. The Robot-as-a-Service model could lower the barrier to entry for companies wanting to deploy robotic foundation models without onboard hardware, potentially accelerating adoption in manufacturing and logistics.