The news: Holiday Robotics, a Seoul startup, raised about $103 million, or 155 billion won, in what is reported as the largest Series A ever for a South Korean startup.
What it does: Its robot, FRIDAY, is a humanoid built for factory and logistics lines that rolls on wheels rather than walking on legs.
It carries 64 degrees of freedom, 40 of them in the hands, hot-swappable batteries for full-shift runs, and a mix of cameras and lidar for perception. The wheeled design is a deliberate bet on getting onto factory floors faster and cheaper than the bipedal robots drawing the industry's biggest rounds.
The plan: Holiday aims to start commercial deliveries in the back half of this year at about 100 units annually, scaling toward 1,000 by 2027, and is targeting automotive, semiconductor, and logistics lines. It has no named customers yet, only private proofs of concept.
The round drew IMM Investment, KB Investment, Korea Development Bank, and US firm Goodwater Capital. Founder Song Ki-young previously built and sold industrial-vision company SuaLab.
Zoom out: The raise lands in a crowded humanoid field where most of the capital is chasing legged robots, from Europe's Humanoid to Agility Robotics. Holiday's wheels are the contrarian, ship-it-sooner wager.
