Korea’s biggest manufacturers back Config, the TSMC of robot data

Config, a Seoul- and San Jose-based startup, has raised a $27 million seed round led by Samsung Venture Investment at a $200M+ valuation, with participation from Hyundai, LG Tech Ventures, and SKT America. The company positions itself as the 'TSMC of robot data' — building the data infrastructure layer for robotic foundation models rather than building robots itself. Config has amassed over 100,000 hours of human motion data (30x larger than the biggest open-source comparable dataset) and differentiates by transforming data to suit how robots move before training begins. Current customers span large manufacturers, system integrators, agriculture, and defense. Plans include scaling to one million hours of data, reaching $10M ARR by end of 2026, and launching a cloud-based Robot-as-a-Service product.