Singapore-based Ropedia, a startup building data infrastructure for physical AI, has raised $22 million in a pre-Series A funding round, bringing its total funding to $30 million, according to an announcement.
The round was led by venture investors focused on AI, deep tech and infrastructure in Southeast Asia, the startup said.
It follows an earlier financing that attracted investors and angel backers with ties to Google, Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), NVIDIA and Amazon.
Ropedia will use the fresh capital to expand its global data collection operations across Southeast Asia and North America, grow its teams in Singapore and the US, and scale manufacturing of its wearable data capture hardware to support larger fleet deployments.
The startup also plans to enhance its data platform with annotation tools, quality analytics and compliance infrastructure, while expanding its AI research efforts in data foundation models and world models.
“A robot can’t play baseball by watching a video any more than you could learn to ride a bike by reading about it. The robot must understand what it’s like to grip a bat and know the timing it takes to hit a ball. That’s the information Ropedia’s technology provides, and it’s why this investment matters. Our technology lets robots capture the experience and real judgment it will take for them to move through the world. If we get all that right, the robots will leave the beta stage and start doing real work, first in factories, then at home, with families,” said Zhaoxi Chen, CEO and Co- Founder of Ropedia.
Ropedia’s platform spans the physical AI data pipeline, from collecting multimodal human experience data using proprietary wearable hardware to delivering model-ready datasets. The datasets are offered through its Xperience-10M platform, which the company says is among the world’s largest human experience datasets, or via customised data-as-a-service (DaaS) offerings for robotics and embodied AI developers.
Currently, Ropedia serves more than 20 global robotics and foundation model companies.
Southeast Asia is home to around 700 active AI startups, according to the 2025 e-Conomy SEA report by Google, Temasek, and Bain & Company.
SimpleAI announced this month that it has raised $5 million in seed funding and secured a separate $10-million debt facility, while Singapore-founded enterprise AI startup Pints AI raised $5.6 million in a pre-Series A funding round last month.
