South Korean Startup MOVIN Raises KRW 10 billion to Advance Robot Training Technology

MOVIN, a South Korean startup that turns human movement into 3D data, has raised 10 billion won, roughly $7.5 million, in a Series A round. The company announced the funding on Nov. 3 and plans to take its motion-capture technology beyond film and games and into robot training. 

IMM Investment led the round. IBK Industrial Bank of Korea and Voyager Ventures joined as new investors, and earlier backers Atinum Investment, Naver D2SF and Schmidt took part again. MOVIN raised 4 billion won in a pre-Series A round last year, which brings its total funding past $10 million. 

The idea is fairly simple. Robots learn physical skills from examples, and people make the best examples. Traditional motion capture records that movement, but it usually needs performers in special suits or markers and a room full of cameras. MOVIN's TRACIN device does the job with a LiDAR sensor and the company's own AI, capturing movement in real time without suits or markers. Researchers from KAIST who study 3D human motion founded the company in 2023. It has said the device costs about a tenth of conventional systems and takes five minutes to set up instead of two hours. Those comparisons are the company's own. 

Robotics customers are already in the mix. MOVIN says Boston Dynamics and the RAI Institute have used its technology for robot teleoperation and training. Partners also use robotics-focused versions of TRACIN to collect human motion data for robot learning, and the company says it was chosen as the only South Korean launch adoption partner for NVIDIA SOMA, a program that supports robot learning with real-world human motion data. 

The new money has a few jobs. MOVIN plans to build a research center of about 100 pyeong, or roughly 330 square meters, to collect multimodal data for world models, which are AI systems that learn how the physical world behaves. It also wants to advance its AI models and grow overseas. On the product side, the company hopes to stretch its single-person capture to large spaces where many people move at once, and to pair it with ultra-lightweight devices and on-device multimodal AI. It says it will keep growing its film and entertainment business while building what it calls the motion-data infrastructure for the physical AI era. 

There are early signs of traction. In July, MOVIN signed an agreement with Diden Robotics to build training datasets for humanoid robots. The company also says it reached $750,000 in revenue within a year of launching its flagship product. The round fits a wider run of Korean funding for physical AI, with startups such as Carbon6 and Hurotics raising money for robots and real-world movement data. 

One caution is worth keeping in mind. MOVIN's content business has a track record, but robotics is newer ground. The company still has to show that its capture technology turns into data robots can learn from at scale. Investors are betting that it can.