Ropedia, a Singapore-based robotics data company, raised $22m in a pre-Series A round announced on 23 July 2026. The company said total funding is now $30m including its seed round. Neither The Robot Report nor SiliconANGLE named the investors.
The company has offices in Singapore and Mountain View, California, and was founded in 2025 by Zhaoxi Chen, its chief executive. No valuation or headcount was disclosed.
“We need to unlock the ChatGPT moment for robotics first.”Zhaoxi Chen, founder and CEO, Ropedia
What Ropedia does
Ropedia sells data for training robots. Its HOMIE device, short for Human-centric Omni Interaction and Experience, is a lightweight head-mounted wearable with four cameras and a swappable battery module. It captures first-person human movement, object interaction and spatial context, and includes a 360-degree camera view, an audio sensor and a motion unit. SiliconANGLE said it weighs under half a pound.
A backend synchronises and annotates the captured video, spatial and motion data. Customers can license existing datasets or use Ropedia's hardware to collect demonstrations in their own facilities. The company claims its approach cuts data-collection costs by up to 50 times compared with traditional methods, a figure not independently verified.
Scale and customers
The Robot Report said Ropedia collects about 1,000 hours of data a week and has gathered 100,000 hours in total. Most existing customers are in the United States. SiliconANGLE reported that the Allen Institute for AI released a 3D motion forecasting model called MolmoMotion, and Chen said Ropedia supplied more than half of the training data sources.
Chen said that delivering 1,000 hours of data is a very different thing from delivering a million hours, which is why the company talks about infrastructure.
What the money is for
Ropedia will scale up HOMIE production, expand data collection in Southeast Asia and North America, and grow its US team and branch. It plans to build out its data platform with annotation tooling, quality analytics and compliance infrastructure, and to expand AI research on data, foundation models and world models.
SiliconANGLE said a second-generation device is expected to be announced next month, with a target of up to 10,000 devices. The Robot Report added plans for a hand device that tracks hand poses and tactile interaction, and shoes that sense foot-ground interaction for humanoid training.
Investors and plans
KrASIA reported that the company said the round was led by venture firms with AI, deep tech and infrastructure experience in Southeast Asia, though it did not name them. The funds are meant for data collection in Southeast Asia and North America, growing teams in Singapore and the US, and increasing wearable production.
The Robot Report reported that Ropedia provides off-the-shelf dataset licensing and custom data acquisition, and that it is expanding its hardware, software, data infrastructure and model development teams. Chen said Ropedia is not a completely full-stack company but develops the majority of its hardware on its own, and that learning from a first-person view is central to the approach.
Company website: ropedia.com