Ropedia builds data pipeline for physical AI

The Singapore startup is targeting 1 million hours of data by year-end.

Singaporean startup Ropedia Pte. Ltd. is raising its investment in data collection for robotics and physical artificial intelligence (AI), as developers seek more real-world information to train machines.

“Data serves as the foundation to bridge that gap, so that computer models and AI systems can better understand what is going on in the physical world,” Chen Zhaoxi, CEO and co-founder at Ropedia, told Singapore Business Review.

Ropedia announced a $28.4m Pre-Series A round in July, bringing its total funding to $38.7m. The company will use the funds to expand its research and development team, develop wrist and full-body data-capture devices, boost its supply chain, and expand in North America and Southeast Asia.

Chen co-founded Ropedia in 2025 with Hong Fangzhou and Liu Ziwei, an associate professor at Nanyang Technological University (NTU). The company grew out of NTU, where the founders worked on methods and patents for collecting and processing data.

Ropedia's Homie device captures egocentric video, depth, motion, and audio from human activity. Its platform synchronises and processes the information into datasets for robotics and physical AI developers.

The company offers the resulting data through Xperience-10M, a human experience dataset, as well as custom data-as-a-service offerings.

Chen said technology companies are spending heavily on databases, data infrastructure, and external data to train AI models. Deploying those models in physical environments would create demand for more data from real-world use, he added.

“The customers for those models will invest a lot into deploying the models and creating a data flywheel to use them in real-world applications,” Chen said.

Ropedia aims to collect 1 million hours of high-quality data by the end of 2026 and conduct a proof-of-concept model validation run.

Over the next two to three years, Chen expects the company to develop into a data science business that researches patterns in multimodal data at scale.

Over five years, he wants Ropedia to become an infrastructure provider for physical and spatial AI, similar to the role Cloudflare, Databricks, and AWS play in internet and cloud infrastructure.

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