Tepa Robotics Secures 2 Billion KRW Pre-Series A Investment

Tepa Robotics, a company developing physical artificial intelligence (AI) for industrial robots, announced on August 5 that it has secured a pre-Series A investment of 2 billion KRW.

Teparo Robotics Industrial Robot Research Facility. Teparo Robotics

This investment round included FuturePlay as a follow-up investor, while IBK Venture Investment and KDB Capital participated as new investors.

Tepa Robotics is a startup in the industrial robotics sector, founded in 2023. The company was co-founded by Chief Technology Officer (CTO) Baek Jonghyun, who previously handled multi-joint robot control and programming at the Korean branch of FANUC, the world's leading industrial robot manufacturer, and CEO Park Junghyuk, who earned his Ph.D. in artificial intelligence from the University of Tokyo in Japan.

Physical AI refers to AI that operates and performs tasks in the real world. It is a next-generation technology that goes beyond recognition AI (such as image and voice recognition) and generative AI (such as text and image generation). Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, projected at CES 2025, the world's largest electronics and IT exhibition, that physical AI will become an industry worth 50 trillion dollars (approximately 70 quadrillion KRW), and identified robotics as a core pillar of Nvidia's future strategy.

Tepa Robotics is applying physical AI to industrial robots, which are the most widely used in industrial settings. Approximately 600,000 industrial robots are supplied globally each year, and these robots, with their high reliability and mass production-based hardware, serve as a key platform to maximize the impact of physical AI. However, the high level of closed systems and complex control environments make research and development extremely challenging.

CEO Park Junghyuk stated, "Securing real-world data is the most important factor in developing physical AI. Tepa Robotics has validated the effectiveness of its open-source Robotics Foundation Model (RFM) by fine-tuning it with 800,000 instances of real-world data collected in-house. We are currently coordinating with customers and field sites to deploy our proprietary model, which has been trained on this data, to industrial robots. Our goal is to continuously collect data and build large-scale physical AI systems."

Jeon Aram, Principal Investment Manager at FuturePlay and lead investor in this round, commented, "Industrial robots must flawlessly handle edge cases in high-speed and high-precision environments. Tepa Robotics is a rare team that operates physical AI in actual mass production environments, based on deep domain expertise and a proprietary data generation pipeline. As the company possesses original technology capable of competing with global big tech firms, we have high expectations for its future developments."