Toss Brings 30 Million Users Into the AI Data Economy in Partnership With Poseidon
Poseidon, a data infrastructure company, has partnered with Toss, a mobile financial platform operated by Viva Republica, to allow everyday users to contribute to AI training and earn compensation. This marks Toss’s first venture into AI data, opening the market to its approximately 30 million users.
The partnership addresses a key challenge for AI: frontier models have exhausted publicly available internet data, and the next generation requires real-world data—how people speak, move, and react—which is not freely available online. Poseidon provides the infrastructure to source and license this data, while Toss supplies a large user base and a seamless financial system for payments.
Through the integration, Poseidon’s contributor app, Numo, is available inside the Toss app. Users can contribute Korean-language training data—voice, image, or video—and receive payment based on their contribution. Each contribution is registered on DATA, the AI data network, with a verifiable provenance trail via Trace, a public audit layer. DATA Foundation, recently rebranded from Story, supports this layer alongside partners like Kled.
The data collected is first-person data, recorded in real environments, which is valuable for physical intelligence applications such as robotics and autonomous vehicles. Demand from global AI labs for such data is rising, and Korea, with its dense real-life data and Toss’s user base, is well-positioned to supply it. The model will first roll out in Korea before expanding globally.
Changhoon Seo, Executive Director of New Business at Toss, emphasized that the partnership will help users easily participate in the data economy and receive transparent rewards. SY Lee, Chief Strategy Officer and Chairman of Poseidon, noted that Korea’s unique combination of strategic AI data importance, mature financial system, and advanced mobile experience makes it an ideal starting point.
Poseidon, incubated by the team behind The DATA Network, raised a $15 million seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). Its Numo app has recorded over 711,000 data registrations worldwide and is now available via Toss.