LiOps has closed the first round of its Series A at KRW 4.0 billion. A second round is under discussion with several institutions, and the Series A is planned to complete through a multiple closing within the year.
The money goes first into a test bed of our own, where welding automation, outdoor autonomous mobile robots and forklifts, and the spatial MES can be proven under real site conditions. Before entering a customer's site, structures that carry real heat distortion and misalignment, outdoor driving, and 3D scanning of a process are all exercised repeatedly in one place, so that the risk of a deployment failing is removed by the supplier rather than carried by the customer.
The remainder is committed in sequence to physical AI training and deployment infrastructure, and to entering markets outside Korea.
Heejoon Park, co-chief executive, said that physical AI, as LiOps defines it, is a robot delivering on a real industrial site the generality that ChatGPT showed in language; and that having proven it first in shipyards, the least structured and hardest sites there are, the company will widen its stride into automotive parts and machining plants to become a global company that sells finished work rather than equipment.