Mountain View, California, October 23rd, 2026, FinanceWire
New initiative provides academic researchers access to HOMIE Gen2, alongside a 500-hour Physical AI data evaluation program as the company expands its U.S. presence.
Ropedia, a Physical AI startup developing data infrastructure for robotics and embodied AI, today announced the launch of its Academic Partner Program, providing selected universities and research institutions access to its HOMIE Gen2 multimodal data capture platform. The initiative aims to accelerate research in robotics, embodied intelligence, and human-robot interaction by expanding access to real-world physical data.
As Physical AI systems advance beyond controlled laboratory settings, access to high-quality real-world data is becoming increasingly important. Ropedia’s Academic Partner Program enables researchers to capture synchronized multimodal information about human movement, object interactions, and physical environments, supporting the development of next-generation World Models and Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models.
Through the program, selected academic partners can access HOMIE Gen2, Ropedia’s head-mounted data capture device featuring improved camera quality and enhanced data collection capabilities. Researchers can process collected data through their own pipelines or use Ropedia’s data processing infrastructure to prepare datasets for downstream research.
“Innovation always starts with research. Through the Academic Partner Program, we want to collaborate with research labs and universities to advance the field of Physical and Embodied AI,” said Zhaoxi Chen, Co-Founder and CEO of Ropedia. “By combining research from academia and resources from the industry, we aim to make data capture more accessible and affordable and build the next generation of physical intelligence.”
Building the Data Foundation for Physical AI
Ropedia’s broader infrastructure spans real-world data capture, processing, annotation, and the development of model-ready datasets. Its Xperience-10M dataset has recorded more than 2.3 million downloads, supporting research in egocentric understanding and embodied AI.
Ropedia’s academic collaboration network includes researchers and institutions across the United States and Asia, including Princeton University, Carnegie Mellon University, the University of California San Diego, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Westlake University, Allen Institute for AI, and Advanced Machine Intelligence.
The company has also made Xperience-10M open source to expand access to data for researchers and developers working to advance Physical AI.
“We believe advancing the industry is a shared responsibility and not something any one company can do alone. Making Xperience-10M open source is part of that commitment, giving researchers and developers access to the data they need to push the boundaries of what is possible and helping the entire field move forward faster,” Chen added.
Expanding U.S. Market Engagement
As part of its growing focus on the U.S. market, Ropedia will participate in the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2026) in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, from September 28–30, at booth 742.
The company is also introducing the Ropedia Evaluation Program, offering 500 hours of real-world Physical AI data to support evaluation and research initiatives.
Founded in Singapore in the second half of 2025 by Zhaoxi Chen, Fangzhou Hong, and Ziwei Liu, Ropedia is headquartered in Singapore and maintains an additional office in Mountain View, California. The company serves more than 20 leading global robotics and foundation model companies.
Academic researchers and institutions interested in participating in the Academic Partner Program can learn more and apply for a HOMIE Gen2 Research Kit at ropedia.com/collaboration.
Building the Data Infrastructure for Physical & Embodied AI
Ropedia is a Physical AI startup dedicated to solving the data bottleneck in modern robotics and embodied intelligence. We build the foundational infrastructure required to train, evaluate, and scale next-generation physical intelligence—from real-world multimodal data capture to high-fidelity processing, annotation, and model-ready dataset delivery.
About Ropedia
Ropedia is a Physical AI data infrastructure company whose core mission is to transform real-world human experience into data that robots and world models can learn from.
The company has built a complete solution spanning HOMIE first-person multimodal capture hardware, the Foundry data processing platform, the Xperience dataset, and Physical data-as-a-Service. Xperience now covers 10 million real-world interaction clips—approximately 100,000 hours of data—and has accumulated over 2.7 million downloads on Hugging Face.
The company currently has offices in four locations worldwide and serves more than 20 robotics and foundation model companies.
For more information, visit ropedia.com.