From food to factories, Neubility is getting smart on robot intelligence

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From food to factories, Neubility is getting smart on robot intelligence

Published: 15 Apr. 2025, 07:00

CHO YONG-JUN
[email protected]

Audio report: written by reporters, read by AI

Neubility Vice President Kang Kee-hyuk, left, and Neubility CEO Lee Sang-min pose with three Neubie robots at the Neubility office in Seongdong District, eastern Seoul [CHO YONG-JUN]

[Game Changer]

The concept of robots in factories has been around for a long time, but a reality in which robots move around and work in our everyday lives is yet to be popularized. Neubie, an autonomous driving delivery robot developed by Neubility, has already delivered books to the National Assembly, firewood to campsites and food to households across Seoul.

Neubie also made headlines for a collision with a vehicle at a crosswalk in Songdo, Incheon, late last year. While robots are considered pedestrians in Korea and the incident was resolved swiftly, a robot crashing into a car was enough to become the talk of the town.

Now that Neubility has accumulated a bunch of experience in very demanding urban environments, the robotics firm now hopes to develop humanoid-like robots and bring robots closer to the everyday lives of people.

“Our goal has always remained the same: to bring robots to people’s daily lives and to have everyone say that they’ve done something with a robot,” Neubility founder and CEO Lee Sang-min said during an interview with the Korea JoongAng Daily at the company’s headquarters in Seongdong District, southern Seoul, in late March.

Neubility, founded in 2017, is the startup behind the food delivery robot that has been roaming around the streets of Songdo, Incheon, and Yeoksam 1-dong in Gangnam District, southern Seoul. The company, working with Samsung C&T, also recently introduced door-to-door food delivery in an apartment complex in Seocho District, southern Seoul, where Neubie robots will take the elevator and deliver food right to the doorstep.

While nothing has been shown to the public so far, Neubility said the company is currently working on a humanoid-like robot that will first be specialized for use in distribution centers.

The company, after raising 23 billion won ($15.86 million) during its Series A funding from IMM Investment, Samsung Wellstroy, Infinitum Partners and other firms, has already secured 10 billion won in Series B investment with hopes of raising 10 to 20 billion won more. Neubility is also on its way to an initial public offering (IPO) and will begin to choose its primary underwriter “by the first half of this year or early in the third quarter,” according to the CEO.

Lee and his Neubility co-founder, Kang Kee-hyuk, sat down with the Korea JoongAng Daily to talk about the company’s first robot, Neubie, robot intelligence — the brain of the robot — and the future of the company.

The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Three different Neubility's Neubie robots are parked at the company's headquarters in Seongdong District, eastern Seoul [CHO YONG-JUN]

Q. Can you introduce Neubility and its robot, Neubie?

Lee Sang-min: Neubility is a company that makes robot intelligence. Many firms in the robotics industry focus on manufacturing industrial robots — the classic type of robot for repetitive tasks in a set environment. We believe in a robot generation where one robot is capable of doing multiple tasks, and we are trying to develop robots for such an era. Neubie was our first product, a delivery robot. We recently launched Neubie Patrol, a patrolling robot, and we are currently working on developing a humanoid-like robot for distribution centers.

There are many robots that have been commercialized overseas. How do Neubility's products compare?

Lee: I believe that the robot industry, eventually, will have to point toward the same direction, just like how Ford introduced mass production for cars, but soon had many other automakers following the same path. Neubility’s advantage lies in the fact that our self-maneuvering robots are vision-based and that we have commercialized camera-based robot intelligence when many other robot makers still mount expensive sensors. We chose to go vision-based almost five and a half years ago and our development know-how, including pathfinding algorithms, is very much with us.

Also, not many countries have such densely packed and populated cities like we do in Korea. Many U.S. residential areas are sparsely populated. And we thought, if we can overcome the difficult environmental challenges in Korea, we will have no problem overcoming other environments overseas.

Doesn’t vision-based technology require more advanced hardware?

Kang Kee-hyuk: Actually, you need to process more if you go with Lidar. With a vision-based system, we only rely on image signals from the camera, whereas a Lidar system can’t just rely on Lidar data, so they usually have a backup camera system, which results in additional data that needs to be processed. Obviously, we face the disadvantage of reconstructing two-dimensional images into three-dimensional data.

Neubility's delivery robot Neubie with its side-facing camera [CHO YONG-JUN

Where is Neubie servicing right now?

Lee: We first introduced Neubie at camping sites, where the robot will help transport meat or firewood — which can be pretty cumbersome to carry around — from nearby camping stores to sites.

We also temporarily used Neubie to transport items when our offices were located in two different buildings. Now we have big companies using Neubie in their human resources development institutes, in hospitals to deliver specimens and so on. We’ve met a lot of interesting demands for Neubie that we hadn't initially thought of. We’ve also had clients who wanted Neubie to transport semiconductor wafer samples or bioproduct samples in a lab.

We were originally hooked on the food delivery idea and developed Neubie specifically for the food delivery market, but we’ve now broadened to cover it all.

The key capability, we figured, is robot intelligence that will be in all robots, and the affordability of robot intelligence. So we are now focusing more on creating more versatile robot intelligence so we can have our robots in different environments.

From left, a food delivery variant of the Neubility Neubie robot, patrol variant of Neubie and Police variant of Neubie [CHO YONG-JUN]

What is robot intelligence?

Lee: Simply speaking, it is the brain of the robot. The level of robot intelligence we have in the market now, to put it simply, is similar to chatbots before ChatGPT and all the other large language model AIs were introduced. They answered your query, but the answers weren’t that good. We aim to create robot intelligence that can sense and be aware of the environment and react based on that. For example, I was a bit late to the interview and we all knew it. I want our robot to be able to have that level of intelligence.

Constructing such features will require more time and money, but because we have the ability to quickly commercialize robots, we first aim to put our robots into distribution centers, where they can try to handle simple tasks. Specifically, we want to have our robots be water spiders (supporting and enhancing efficiency and productivity) that reposition empty palettes. It’s a simple and repetitive task but you don’t always move to and from the same location.

Kang: The key in robot intelligence is having the robot physically interact with the world and having its intelligence also interact with physical movement, which is still lacking in the industry. We have already developed robot intelligence for Neubie, which is specialized in getting to places, so we are trying to utilize and expand the software we have.

Isn’t a robot delivering food and humanoid robots in distribution centers very different specialties?

Lee: I mean, just because you learned how to walk in Korea doesn’t mean you don’t know how to walk in the United States, right? We taught Neubie how to navigate paths so far, and there are two major actions done by humans in distribution centers: moving to different locations and performing tasks. We’ve already solved the first bit, and now we have to tackle the performing task bit, which all other robot manufacturers are trying to figure out.

Neubility CEO Lee Sang-min, left, and Neubility Vice President Kang Kee-hyuk at the Neubility office in Seongdong District, eastern Seoul [CHO YONG-JUN]

Is there a field that Neubie didn’t fit in?

Lee: Neubies in golf courses, we thought, would be an easy market to penetrate, but we quickly learned that we weren’t able to meet the demand of the customers. We initially thought of introducing Neubie to replace beverage cart attendants — staff who sell drinks and alcoholic beverages to the players. Some players order from them because they want a drink, while others don’t... and we realized that Neubie couldn’t meet the demands of the customers.

How is Neubility working with Nvidia?

Kang: We’ve been in touch with Nvidia Korea for a while and we use Nvidia to power Neubie’s brain, which is how Nvidia invited us to its presentation at Computex. Neubie utilizes Nvidia’s Edge Computing platform so it is quite energy efficient and suitable for use in our robots. We will also continue to use Nvidia chips. We are also looking into Nvidia Cosmos, a foundation model platform, as we research further into robot intelligence.

We are also planning a robot intelligence solution business, where we license our Neubility Sense software to other firms, and they will also be using Nvidia chips.

How have you worked with the firms that have invested in Neubility?

Lee: We’ve worked with SK Telecom and SK Shieldus to create Neubie Petrol and we will be continuing to collaborate with them. We have secured 10 billion won in Series B investment so far, and we plan on securing 10 to 20 billion won more.

There will be no major changes to our planned investment and IPO timeline, and regarding the IPO, we will be selecting a primary underwriter by the first half of this year or early in the third quarter, so we’ve not got much time. We hope to finalize the underwriter by June and go through a business evaluation.

DIfferent prototype Neubiilty Neubie robots at the Neubility office in Seongdong District, eastern Seoul [CHO YONG-JUN]

Neubie was all over the internet when a car hit the robot as one was crossing a crosswalk at a red light in Songdo, Incheon. What happened there?

Lee: Neubie was waiting for the signal, but a car stopped on the crosswalk and Neubie couldn’t see the traffic light. The robot asked our teleoperation monitoring center for help and the operator tried to reposition the robot when the car turning right crashed into Neubie.

Neubie, by law, is considered a pedestrian and is required to use the pavement, and I think maneuvering through a sidewalk is more difficult than driving cars on the road — cars at least have indicators and more solid rules that drivers must follow, and the roads are well cleaned and maintained. Sidewalks, less so — I mean, cars have lights at night and the roads are well-lit — while people are on sidewalks, which I think is why such accidents are happening.

What is your ultimate goal with Neubility?

Lee: Our goal has always remained the same: to bring robots to people’s daily lives and to have everyone say that they’ve done something with a robot — whether that be food delivery, or protecting your house with a patrol robot or anything — that’s Neubility’s goal and our vision.

Kang: When people talk about robots, they still talk about sci-fi movies, and while industrial or manufacturing robots have been in use for a while, robots in general are yet to be with us in our everyday lives.

Neubility Vice President Kang Kee-hyuk, left, and Neubility CEO Lee Sang-min at the Neubility office in Seongdong District, eastern Seoul [CHO YONG-JUN]

BY CHO YONG-JUN [[email protected]]