South Korean physical AI startup RLWRLD has closed a Seed 2 funding round worth approximately $26M USD (KRW 39 billion), bringing its total seed funding to around $41M USD (KRW 60 billion) following a $15M USD (KRW 21 billion) Seed 1 round.

The round was designed not simply to raise additional capital, but to expand RLWRLD’s coalition of strategic investors with direct access to industrial operations. Participants include global venture capital firm Headline Asia and Z Venture Capital — the corporate venture arm of Z Holdings, the integrated entity formed by Yahoo Japan and Line — as financial investors, alongside strategic investors CJ Logistics, Kakao Investment, Lotte Ventures, Hanwha Asset Management, and the Mirae Asset–E-Mart New Growth Investment Fund No. 1.

Following its Seed 1 close, RLWRLD moved beyond technology validation and early proof-of-concept work into active field collaboration. The company said the accelerating pace of joint project requests and medium-to-long-term partnership inquiries from industry players made the additional round necessary.

Headline Asia plans to leverage the investment to support RLWRLD’s global expansion — including into North America — and to facilitate connections across the broader industrial ecosystem. Z Venture Capital will focus on accelerating pilot programs and commercialization discussions in Japan, drawing on Z Holdings’ extensive network across telecommunications, distribution, and services.

On the domestic front, RLWRLD is already running field-based collaborations with major Korean conglomerates including CJ Logistics and Lotte across logistics, distribution, and services operations. Several of these projects have progressed past MOU signing into joint pilot stages.

“The next step in robotics begins with turning field-learned experience into scalable intelligence — so that what one robot learns on one site can be applied across many others,” said a founding partner at Headline Asia. “In East Asia, where labor shortages are intensifying, RLWRLD’s ability to build up real-world operational data in close partnership with major industry players is a critical foundation for long-term competitive advantage.”

CJ Logistics’ CFO noted that the future of logistics competitiveness lies not in equipment automation alone, but in how quickly companies can deploy an advanced AI brain capable of understanding the operational environment and making autonomous decisions. “Through our collaboration and strategic investment in RLWRLD, we intend to jointly develop a robotics foundation model that can be deployed directly in logistics operations,” he said.

Joonghee Ryu, CEO of RLWRLD, described the Seed 2 round as a strategic expansion of alliances rather than a straightforward capital raise. “Physical AI is meaningless unless it’s validated in the field. Starting with our model release this year, we’ll be moving into full-scale global robotics transformation in partnership with our strategic investors,” he said.

RLWRLD plans to officially release its robotics foundation model in the first half of 2026.