RLWRLD names former IBM consulting executive COO to advance robotics commercialization

RLWRLD, the South Korean–headquartered physical AI company that introduced its RLDX-1 robotics foundation model at Dexterity Night in San Francisco, has named former IBM Consulting Korea managing partner Min Jung Kim as chief operating officer. She will oversee global operations and help expand commercial adoption of the company’s technology.

RLWRLD develops AI models that help robots with five-finger hands perform precise manipulation tasks in manufacturing, logistics and service settings. At Dexterity Night, a San Francisco showcase for its dextrous robots, the company presented RLDX-1 for tasks including grasping, pouring and tool use. It says commercialization pilots are underway with industrial partners in South Korea, Japan, Europe and the United States.

RLDX-1 is built on what RLWRLD calls a Multi-Stream Action Transformer, which combines cognition, action, proprioception and physical-sensing streams. In the company’s technical report, the model succeeded on 86.8% of tasks run on WIRobotics’ ALLEX humanoid, against about 40% for Physical Intelligence’s pi0.5 and NVIDIA’s GR00T N1.6 in the same evaluation. RLWRLD says it uses robots deployed at industrial sites in South Korea and Japan to record how skilled workers perform tasks, then feeds that data back into the model. The company has raised about $41 million in seed funding, including a $26 million Seed 2 round in February from investors including CJ Logistics, Lotte Ventures, Kakao Investment and Hanwha.

Kim previously held an Asia-Pacific corporate strategy leadership role at IBM Consulting and worked at McKinsey in Korea and Germany. She also held executive positions at SK and Hanwha and most recently served as CEO of LF Food. She earned a bachelor’s degree in chemistry from POSTECH and a doctorate in polymer chemistry from the University of Stuttgart.

Her responsibilities will include strengthening RLWRLD’s operating structure and supporting strategic relationships with customers and industrial partners as the company expands. The announcement included no new figures on paid deployments or revenue.

“Physical AI has the potential to fundamentally transform how industries operate, but realizing that potential requires more than technological breakthroughs,” Kim said in the announcement. “It requires a deep understanding of industrial challenges and the organizational capabilities to translate innovation into scalable business solutions.”