Palo Alto, United States, June 26th, 2026, Chainwire
Toss users can now contribute real-world data to train AI and get paid for it, in a first-of-its-kind model launching in Korea ahead of global expansion.
Frontier AI has run out of internet to scrape. The next generation of models depends on real-world data, the kind that captures how people actually speak, move, and react, which does not exist on the open web and has never had a clean way to be sourced, licensed, or paid for. Poseidon is building the infrastructure to change that, and Toss brings the reach to do it at scale.
Through the partnership, Poseidon's contributor app, Numo, launches inside the Toss app. Toss users can help build Korean-language training data across voice, image, and video, and receive payment tied directly to what they contribute. Poseidon provides the infrastructure that tracks each contribution and its value, while Toss provides the user base and the financial experience that turns participation into payment. Together they offer a working answer to a question the AI industry has struggled with, which is how to compensate the people whose data makes models better.
Every contribution made through Numo is registered on DATA, the AI data network that Poseidon refines data for. DATA gives each record a verifiable provenance trail through Trace, its public audit layer, so a buyer can see where a piece of training data came from and a contributor can see that their work was counted and paid. DATA Foundation, which launched this week from the rebrand of Story, is building this layer alongside integration partners including the human data marketplace Kled, and Poseidon is one of the largest sources of refined data flowing into it.
What Numo collects is first-person data, recorded by real people in real environments, which is among the hardest and most valuable categories to obtain. It is the raw material for physical intelligence, the AI that has to operate in the physical world across robotics, autonomous vehicles, and other applications. Demand from global AI labs for this kind of data is climbing, and Korea is positioned to supply it, with its dense real-life data and Toss's user base. Poseidon and Toss intend to prove the model in Korea, then expand to global markets.
Changhoon Seo, Executive Director of New Business at Toss, said: "As the AI industry grows, demand for high-quality data is rising just as fast. Toss plans to build an environment where users can take part in the data economy more easily and naturally, and to expand a structure in which the value they contribute is rewarded transparently."
SY Lee, Chief Strategy Officer and Chairman of Poseidon, said: "Korea is one of the few markets where the strategic importance of AI data, a mature financial system, and world-class mobile experience all exist at once. Toss is the right partner to turn user-contributed AI data from an early idea into a standard the rest of the world can adopt." Lee previously founded the web-novel platform Radish and sold it to Kakao Entertainment, co-founded Story, the IP infrastructure that recently rebranded as DATA Foundation, and was named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum this year.
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