Robai began when deployment, not the robot, proved the bottleneck.
Founded in Seoul in 2023 after seeing integrator timelines up close on factory floors, where the machine was ready but the software process was not.
The observation behind Robai
Jung Won-young spent over eight years in industrial automation and production environments. Task changes repeated the same sequence: new fixtures, integrator booked for weeks, line idle until code caught up. The robot was capable and precise. The bottleneck was the days and weeks needed to give it new instructions.
Imitation learning, developed in robotics labs, had matured enough to cut instruction cycles from weeks to hours. Robai brings it to real production hardware as a deployable platform for controllers already in the plant.
Bootstrapped, Robai keeps incentives simple: it must work on real lines for real manufacturers. No product-led growth trick replaces a clean-running line.
The people building it
Jung Won-young
Chief Executive Officer
Built motion-control and robot perception systems in high-volume production environments before founding Robai. Saw the reprogramming bottleneck from both sides of the factory floor.
Kwon Seokjae
Chief Technology Officer
Built Robai's motion-policy architecture from its first prototype. Deep expertise in imitation learning and distributed robot inference, applied to ML for industrial control systems.
Larisa Mendes
Head of Engineering
Leads edge-runtime and integration work for Robai on real plant hardware. Previously worked in platform engineering at an industrial automation software company serving OEM customers.