Insider Brief
- Ropedia raised $30 million in pre-A funding to expand its data infrastructure for physical AI, including real-world interaction data for robotics and embodied AI companies.
- The Singapore-based startup said the financing includes a newly announced $22 million round and an earlier $8 million round, with funding directed toward data collection, Homie hardware deployment and AI research.
- Ropedia’s Homie wearable captures synchronized video, audio, depth, hand tracking, gaze, body motion and camera-pose data, feeding its Xperience-10M dataset for robotics training and simulation.
Ropedia raised $30 million in pre-A funding to expand its data infrastructure for physical AI.
According to the Singapore-based startup, the funding will support collection of real-world, multimodal interaction data and help it deliver datasets to companies building robots and embodied AI systems. The financing came from venture investors with experience in AI, enterprise technology and infrastructure in Southeast Asia, as well as long-term financial investors and strategic partners in robotics, mobility and enterprise deployment.
The company said the pre-A financing closed in two parts. The latest round raised $22 million and followed an earlier $8 million round announced on social media March 16.
“A robot can’t play baseball by watching a video any more than you could learn to ride a bike by reading about it,” co-founder and CEO Zhaoxi Chen said i the announcement. “The robot must understand what it’s like to grip a bat and know the timing it takes to hit a ball. That’s the information Ropedia’s technology provides, and it’s why this investment matters. Text scraped from the internet was used to train the last generation of AI. Real-world human experience, captured at the same scale, will train physical AI. Physical AI will let us leave the lab and go to work, first in factories, then at home, helping our families.”
The new funding will go toward data collection and expanding collection across Southeast Asia and North America, as well as hardware deployment and scaling larger fleets of Homie devices. AI research, platform work, advancing its data platform and hiring engineers in the U.S.is also among its priorities, the company noted.
Ropedia is building tools to collect and structure the kind of data robots need to operate in the physical world and its system Homie, a wearable, head-mounted device that captures first-person human activity. Ropedia said the device records several streams at the same time. Instead of labeling data collected elsewhere, it generates the data through Homie, then synchronizes, structures and refines it through its own pipeline.
Homie’s capabilities include:
Video and audio: first-person recordings of what a person sees and hears.
Depth data: information about distance and space around the wearer.
Hand tracking and gaze: data showing what the person is doing and where they are looking.
Body motion and camera pose: movement data that helps connect actions to the surrounding environment.
Timestamps: synchronization across each stream so perception and action can be matched in real time.
That synchronized data is fed into Ropedia’s processing and annotation systems to create model-ready data for robotics and embodied AI developers.
The company indicated its approach also differs from teleoperation-based data collection, which uses robots themselves to collect task data. Ropedia said Homie can be worn by people in many environments and does not depend on expensive robot fleets or a single robot form factor.
The company sells access to its data pipeline through dataset licensing, selective access to Homie hardware and research collaboration.
Ropedia’s flagship dataset Xperience-10M includes 10 million interaction episodes and more than 10,000 hours of multimodal recordings, spanning synchronized video, depth, motion-capture and inertial-sensor frames. Each additional Homie deployment expands the dataset with new environments, behaviors and interactions, according to Ropedia. The company said the system can lower data-collection costs by up to 50 times compared with traditional methods.
Homie is being mass produced and Ropedia said it has served more than a dozen North American companies working in embodied AI and spatial intelligence.
Ropedia said robotics and physical AI labs need more real-world data, delivered faster and across a wider range of settings and tasks. The company is positioning itself as a data infrastructure layer for physical AI, similar to how data centers supported cloud computing and internet text supported language-model training.
Ropedia was founded in the second half of 2025 by CEO Zhaoxi Chen, CTO Fangzhou Hong and chief scientist Ziwei Liu, an associate professor at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.
The company is headquartered in Singapore and has an additional office in Mountain View, Calif.
