Physical AI startup RLWRLD raises $26M

Physical AI startup RLWRLD is tackling one of the hardest problems in robotics by developing AI that enables robots to move like humans. In a field where global tech giants are fiercely competing, the company has raised a cumulative 60 billion won ($41.8 million) in seed funding alone, positioning RLWRLD as a new benchmark for physical AI in Korea.

The founder of the company, CEO Junghee Ryu, is already a well-known figure in Korea's startup scene. He is one of the few Korean founders whose startup was directly acquired by a US tech giant, and he spent over a decade as an accelerator backing deeptech startups in Korea. Ryu’s decision to return to entrepreneurship, stepping back from his role as an accelerator, has once again drawn significant industry attention. The pivotal moment for this new path goes back about three years.

"There was a conference for alumni of Seoul Science High School that brought together people from Seoul National University, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), Google, and Naver. Despite the long-awaited nature of the gathering, the mood was surprisingly dark,” Ryu recalled. According to Ryu, the consensus among the attendees was that Korea had already fallen far behind in the AI field defined by ChatGPT. There was a shared concern that even the most talented researchers could not produce results without the right equipment and funding. Then, the conversation ended with a grim conclusion: “If this keeps up, we are all finished.”

At the time, Ryu was leading the deeptech-focused accelerator FuturePlay and sensed that the moment demanded change more urgently than ever. He concluded that the problem was not the capability of individual talent but rather the industrial environment caught in the middle of a transformation. This realization led him to decide that he would build the environment himself.

“AI technologies like ChatGPT were already a space dominated by the US and China. But AI for moving robots was still an open field, with no one in control. And the tide of AI technology was already shifting from language models toward robotics,” said Ryu.

This took place well before NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang declared the era of physical AI to the world. In a gathering of leading researchers, including ICT endowed chair professor Jin-woo Shin from the Kim Jaechul Graduate School of AI at KAIST, Ryu proposed the development of a foundation model for robotics. He envisioned an AI software platform that is not tied to any specific robot hardware but is universally applicable to any robotic system. "In physical AI, Korea can become a global superpower that leads the world,” Ryu stated.