Singapore-based Ropedia said on Thursday that it has closed a $22 million Pre-Series A funding round, lifting its total capital raised since founding to roughly $30 million as the physical AI data supplier moves to scale its wearable capture hardware and multimodal data platform beyond Southeast Asia.
Cutting the cost of teaching robots
Founded in 2024 by CEO Zhaoxi Chen, Ropedia builds what it describes as the data infrastructure for physical AI: an end-to-end stack that captures in-the-wild human behavior with a head-mounted device called HOMIE, structures the resulting egocentric video, depth, motion and IMU streams through its Experience Engine platform, and delivers model-ready datasets to robotics foundation-model teams. The company claims its approach cuts data collection costs by up to 50 times compared with traditional teleoperation and simulation methods.
Who is backing the round
The Pre-Series A was led by undisclosed venture investors focused on AI, deep technology and infrastructure across Southeast Asia. Earlier tranches drew in super-angels affiliated with Google, Andreessen Horowitz, NVIDIA and Amazon. Ropedia said its wearable capture device has entered mass production, and its customer roster now includes more than 20 robotics and foundation-model companies across North America, China and Singapore. The company also released its Xperience-10M dataset earlier this year, a 10-million-episode collection of multimodal human-experience data used to pre-train vision-language-action systems and world models.
What the money will pay for
Ropedia said proceeds will fund expansion of its data-collection operations in Southeast Asia and North America, add engineering and go-to-market staff in Singapore and the United States, and ramp manufacturing of the HOMIE wearable. Additional investment will go into annotation tooling, quality analytics and compliance infrastructure, plus research on data foundation models and world models. The raise lands the same week rivals in physical-AI data infrastructure have attracted fresh capital, including Etched's $300M Series C for AI inference chips (see Etched Series C coverage) and Genesis AI's reported $500M round at a $3B valuation (Genesis AI raise), reinforcing how central real-world training data has become to embodied AI development. Ropedia is positioning itself alongside emerging physical-AI infrastructure providers such as those profiled in our earlier Ohio fund analysis.
Reporting based on coverage from TNGlobal, SiliconANGLE, DealStreetAsia and Finsmes.