Insider Brief
- RLWRLD has closed a $26 million Seed 2 round, bringing total seed funding to approximately $41 million as it develops robotics foundation models trained directly inside live industrial environments.
- The round included Headline Asia and Z Venture Capital, alongside strategic investors such as CJ Logistics, Lotte Ventures and Hanwha Asset Management, with several proof-of-concept and joint deployment projects already underway in Korea and Japan.
- RLWRLD said it plans to unveil its robotics foundation model in the first half of 2026, positioning real-world industrial data collection as a core competitive advantage in Physical AI.
PRESS RELEASE — RLWRLD, a Physical AI company developing robotics foundation models––software intelligence trained directly in real industrial environments––has closed a Seed 2 funding round, bringing its total seed investment to approximately $41 million. The latest round raised approximately $26 million, following a $15 million Seed 1 round. The company said the new funding was driven not solely by capital needs but by a strategic push to expand its coalition of industry-based strategic investors (SIs) as demand for collaborative deployments accelerates.
The Seed 2 round includes financial investors Headline Asia, a Silicon Valley-based global venture capital firm, and Z Venture Capital Corporation, the corporate venture arm of Z Holdings — the merged entity of Yahoo Japan and LINE. Strategic investors participating in the round include CJ Logistics, Kakao Investment, Lotte Ventures, Hanwha Asset Management, Mirae Asset – Emart Investment Fund I, Hyosung Ventures, Smilegate Investment and T Investment. Hashed Ventures, which led the Seed 1 round, also participated in Seed 2.
Headline Asia plans to leverage the investment to support RLWRLD’s expansion into North America and broader global markets, as well as to facilitate connections across the industrial ecosystem. Z Venture Capital Corporation will focus on accelerating proof-of-concept (PoC) and commercialization discussions in Japan, drawing on its extensive network across the telecommunications, retail and services sectors. Several PoC and Robotics Transformation (RX) projects are already underway with investors in South Korea and Japan. Collaborative projects with major domestic companies — including CJ Logistics and Lotte — are in progress across logistics, distribution and service environments, with some having advanced to joint deployment stages following memoranda of understanding. Unlike robotics companies developing models primarily in lab environments, RLWRLD trains its foundation models directly inside live industrial operations through its strategic investor network, creating a proprietary real-world data advantage.
“The next phase of robotics begins with scalable intelligence — robots that learn directly on real production floors like factories and apply that accumulated experience across more sites,” said Akio Tanaka, founding partner of Headline Asia. “In East Asia, where labor shortages are intensifying, RLWRLD’s ability to work closely with major industrial partners and accumulate real-world data is a critical foundation for building long-term competitive advantage.”
“The competitiveness of future logistics lies not in simple facility automation, but in how quickly companies can secure a sophisticated AI brain that understands operations and makes autonomous decisions,” said Jong-hoon Lee, CFO and head of management support at CJ Logistics. “Through our collaboration and strategic investment with RLWRLD, we will jointly advance a robotics foundation model directly applicable to logistics environments and accelerate the transition to AI-based autonomous operations at our distribution centers.”
“Robotics intelligence can’t be built in isolation, it has to be trained where work actually happens,” said Junghee Ryu, founder and CEO of RLWRLD. “Our strategy is to develop and deploy alongside the companies operating factories, logistics networks and service environments every day. The model we’re launching this year is designed to learn directly from those settings and improve as it moves across them.”
RLWRLD plans to officially unveil its robotics foundation model in the first half of 2026.
For more information on the Seed 2 round and the upcoming model launch, visit https://www.rlwrld.ai/
