[The Kwangwoon University 2025 Pre-Startup Package CEO] Vertical Labs, Eliminating Barriers to Data Collection and Model Training for AI Robots

Changjoo Nam CEO of Vertical Labs

-Flagship product ‘Easy Trainer’ automates the entire lifecycle of robotic AI training

-Simplifies complex workflows to enable even beginners to collect high-quality data effortlessly

Vertical Labs is a technology company dedicated to radically simplifying the entire process of data collection and training for robotic AI models. Developed by experts based on firsthand challenges encountered in research and industrial fields, the company focuses on eliminating the barrier to entry for robotic AI development. It was founded in November 2025 by CEO Changjoo Nam (41), an engineer who has researched robot intelligence and algorithms for approximately 18 years.

The company's flagship product is ‘Easy Trainer’ an automated robotic AI training platform. High-quality data is essential for training robotic AI—specifically Imitation Learning and Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models—but conventional methods required significant time and specialized expertise just to set up the data collection environment.

Easy Trainer eliminates these complexities, allowing novices to collect high-quality data with ease, while enabling R&D professionals to move past environmental configuration and focus on solving core problems. The platform is scalable to various robots and sensors, including humanoids and robotic hands, and supports a wide array of remote control devices such as VR gear, leader robots, and motion capture systems.

Vertical Labs also provides a dedicated ‘Leader Robot’ that shares the same kinematic structure as the target robot, allowing for data collection without the need for motion retargeting (the process of converting control movements to fit the robot). Furthermore, the platform offers a no-code environment where users can immediately train open-source AI models with collected data and deploy them to actual robots.

By focusing on scalability and simplicity, Easy Trainer removes bottlenecks in the AI robot development process. It eliminates the friction associated with building data collection environments—a secondary task to the actual development and application of AI models—enabling both beginners and experts to secure high-quality data for diverse robots and tasks. Beyond being a mere collection tool, Easy Trainer provides an integrated infrastructure for robotic AI learning, featuring data management and augmentation, virtual environment expansion, and quantitative data quality measurement. It is an ideal solution for easily establishing the ‘Robot Data Factories’ currently gaining industry attention.

Vertical Labs is currently conducting sales activities centered on government-funded research institutes, university laboratories, and R&D divisions of manufacturing enterprises. CEO Nam is leveraging his extensive network in academia from his years as a professor, as well as industrial connections established through various industry-academic projects.

Regarding future plans, CEO Nam stated, “Our goal is to secure a leading position in the standard infrastructure for robotic AI training and play a central role in the construction of Robot Data Factories. While South Korea is a manufacturing powerhouse with the world's highest robot density, robots used in industrial fields are still largely confined to repeating fixed tasks.”

Founded: November 2025
Core Business: Development of platforms that eliminate barriers to AI robot data collection and training
Key Achievements: One completed sale and two pre-orders secured since incorporation

reporter jinho lee
jinho2323@hankyung.com