WIRobotics — wearable and humanoid robots from South Korea

• 2021
  Founded
• Cheonan, KR
  Headquarters
• ALLEX
  Latest flagship (2025)
• ~$68M Series B
  Funding raised
• South Korea
  Country
• Private
  Status

About WIRobotics

WIRobotics Inc. was founded in June 2021 by a team of four former engineers from Samsung Electronics' Robotics Development team. The company is co-led by Younbaek Lee, Co-Founder and CEO, and Yong-Jae Kim, Co-Founder, Co-CEO, and CTO — Kim is also a professor at Korea University of Technology and Education (KOREATECH). The founding thesis is unusual for a humanoid entrant: rather than jumping directly to a bipedal, general-purpose robot, WIRobotics chose to first commercialize wearable robotics and use the resulting real-world human-movement data as the foundation for a later humanoid platform.

That strategy produced WIM (We Innovate Mobility), an ultra-lightweight 1.6 kg hip-worn exoskeleton launched commercially in early 2024. WIM was recognized as a CES 2025 Innovation Award winner in the Robotics category and has since expanded into the U.S. and European markets under the WIM S variant. Because WIM is worn during ordinary walking — not just in clinical or industrial settings — WIRobotics has accumulated an unusually large corpus of natural human gait and force-interaction data. That corpus underpins the company's Physical AI effort: modeling how humans actually move under load, then transferring those control policies to a humanoid form factor.

In August 2025 the company unveiled ALLEX (ALL-EXperience), its general-purpose humanoid platform, opening a new chapter beyond wearables. In May 2026 WIRobotics closed a Series B round of approximately KRW 100 billion (roughly USD 68 million), bringing cumulative funding to over USD 90 million. Investors have included South Korean strategic and financial backers focused on the country's rapidly consolidating humanoid ecosystem. The company also announced a strategic partnership with foundation-model startup RLWRLD to integrate large behavior models with the ALLEX platform.

WIRobotics operates in a Korean humanoid landscape defined by three flagship players: itself, Rainbow Robotics (a KAIST spinout and maker of HUBO, now majority-owned by Samsung Electronics), and Doosan Robotics (industrial collaborative robots pivoting toward humanoid). Where Rainbow leans on decades of bipedal research and Doosan leverages an installed base of cobots, WIRobotics differentiates on wearable-derived motion data, ultra-low-friction backdrivable actuation, and whole-body compliance — a bet that the physical AI problem is best solved by robots that mimic human compliance rather than industrial precision.

Technology stack

WIRobotics' technical position is defined by two ideas that connect its wearable and humanoid lines: ultra-low-friction, backdrivable actuation as the mechanical primitive, and human-movement data as the training substrate. Both product families use the same actuator design philosophy, and both feed a shared Physical AI model pipeline.

Perception

On WIM, perception is minimal by design — inertial and gait-phase sensors detect walking cadence and supply an assist-as-needed torque profile. On ALLEX, WIRobotics has moved to a full multi-camera vision system, force-torque feedback at the wrist and fingers, and — notably — force detection without dedicated tactile sensors. The compliant hand's ultra-low-friction transmission allows the actuator itself to sense contact forces as small as 100 gram-force by reading current and joint deflection, eliminating dozens of failure-prone tactile channels.

Physical AI and control

WIRobotics has publicly positioned itself as a Physical AI company, building on the 400+ clinical datasets accumulated from WIM deployments and now extending to whole-body ALLEX control. In mid-2026 the company released an open ALLEX simulation model (URDF, MJCF, and USD assets) alongside Sim-to-Real validation results — an unusually open move intended to grow a research ecosystem around the platform. A strategic partnership with foundation-model startup RLWRLD supplies the large-behavior-model layer that maps natural-language and vision inputs to ALLEX's 48 actuated joints.

Actuators, power, and compute

Both WIM and ALLEX use custom BLDC actuators engineered for low friction and high backdrivability. On WIM this yields a 1.6 kg wearable that supplies 6 N·m of assistive torque from a 14.4 V lithium-ion pack; on ALLEX the same philosophy scales up to arm and hand actuators with more than 10× lower friction and rotational inertia than conventional collaborative robot arms. The 700 g hand and roughly 5 kg per-arm assembly keep distal inertia low, which is critical both for safety and for shrinking the sim-to-real gap during Physical AI training.

Under the surface, both platforms lean heavily on the same class of components that dominate the broader humanoid supply chain: wide-bandgap SiC and GaN power semiconductors in the motor-driver stages for high-efficiency torque control, precision MLCC capacitors and low-tolerance passives on every gate-drive and current-sense rail, and battery-management ICs that combine cell balancing, thermal monitoring, and multi-stage protection — the reliability of which sets the practical ceiling on how long any wearable or humanoid can run between charges. On ALLEX in particular, high-DOF hand kinematics multiply the parts count dramatically: dozens of miniature motor drivers, current-sense amplifiers, and precision resistors are packed into each finger and wrist assembly.

The robotics supply chain — where Hybrid Electronics fits in

A modern humanoid robot is one of the most component-dense products ever built. A single ALLEX-class platform depends on thousands of individual electronic components: precision BLDC motor drivers per joint, high-torque servo modules, IMUs and 6-DoF force-torque sensors, LiDAR and time-of-flight modules, GPU compute boards, battery-management ICs, wide-bandgap SiC/GaN power semiconductors, high-speed board-to-board connectors, precision resistors, and thousands of MLCC capacitors distributed across every power and signal rail. Wearable exoskeletons like WIM add their own tight constraints — every gram in the actuator, driver, and battery pack matters, which drives selection toward miniature integrated power devices and low-profile precision passives.

Building that kind of hardware puts enormous pressure on the electronic-components supply chain. Prototype pilots and low-volume production runs frequently hit allocation, EOL notices, and long lead times on the exact parts they need, and R&D and field-service teams routinely have to support older platforms that use semiconductors no longer in mainstream distribution. During the current humanoid robotics and general-purpose robot AI boom, this pressure is amplified: dozens of well-funded teams — including Rainbow Robotics, Doosan Robotics, Tesla, Figure, and 1X — are chasing the same short list of high-torque BLDC drivers, precision IMUs, GPU compute modules, and automotive-grade power semiconductors, and franchise stock on many key parts is now measured in months of lead time rather than weeks.

Hybrid Electronics has been sourcing electronic components for industrial and embedded systems since 1995. For robotics teams — humanoid, mobile, industrial, and research — we specialize in finding the parts you need when mainstream distribution can't:

Trademark and affiliation notice. WIRobotics®, ALLEX, WIM, and WIM S are trademarks of WIRobotics Inc. Hybrid Electronics is an independent electronic-components sourcing company and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or authorized by WIRobotics Inc. All information on this page is compiled from public sources for educational and reference purposes.