Seoul-based Physical AI startup RLWRLD on Tuesday outlined a deployment-first strategy for industrial humanoids, arguing that the fastest route to useful robot foundation models runs through real factories and warehouses rather than lab-only benchmarks.
ALLEX On The Factory Floor
CEO Junghee Ryu, a Kakao and Google Brain alum, said RLWRLD is training its foundation models against operational data from its ALLEX bimanual robot, developed with Korean partner WIRobotics. ALLEX has been running pilots inside CJ Logistics distribution centers and Lotte retail-service sites across South Korea and Japan.
“Physical AI finds its answers on industrial sites, not in labs,” Ryu said in remarks that echo the deployment-first argument Figure and 1X have made for humanoids in the U.S. market. The idea is that repeated pick-place, sortation and packaging jobs generate enough diverse dexterity data to bootstrap generalist policies.
$42M Seed To Bench The Big Names
RLWRLD has raised roughly $42 million across two seed rounds — a $14.8 million seed in April 2025 and a $26 million Seed 2 closed in February 2026 — backed by Headline Asia, Z Ventures and strategic investors including CJ Logistics, Kakao Investment, Lotte Ventures, Hanwha Asset Management and Mirae Asset–Emart. That puts it directly in the funding race with Physical Intelligence, Skild AI and Covariant.
Korea's Physical AI Push
RLWRLD is a headline exhibitor at the Humanoids Summit in Seoul, backed by South Korea’s Ministry of Science and ICT. The country is trying to position itself as a Physical AI hub between U.S. model developers and Chinese hardware makers, and has already committed to national humanoid initiatives.
See also Figure's Helix 2.5 zero-shot home pilots and UBTech's Walker C1 Balkans debut.
Reporting based on coverage from Robotics & Automation News, The Robot Report and Digital Today Korea.