Disclaimer: The below article is sponsored, and the views in it do not represent those of ZyCrypto. Readers should conduct independent research before taking any actions related to the project mentioned in this piece. This article should not be regarded as investment advice.
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.
Poseidon, the data infrastructure built to source and license real-world data for AI, has announced a partnership with Toss, the mobile financial platform operated by Viva Republica, enabling everyday users to contribute to AI training and earn payment for their contributions.
It marks Toss’s first move into AI data, opening the market to its roughly 30 million users.
Why This Matters
 
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 doesn’t 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. Toss brings the reach to do it at scale.
How It Works
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 their contributions. Poseidon provides the infrastructure that tracks each contribution and its value; Toss provides the user base and financial experience that turns participation into real payment. Together, the two offer a working answer to a question the AI industry has long struggled with: how do you compensate the people whose data actually improves models?
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 buyers can see exactly where a piece of training data came from, and contributors can see that their work was counted and paid. The DATA Foundation, which launched this week from the rebrand of Story, is building this layer alongside integration partners, including the human data marketplace Kled, with Poseidon serving as one of the largest sources of refined data flowing into it.
Why Korea First
What Numo collects is first-person data — recorded by real people in real environments — among the hardest and most valuable categories of data to obtain. It’s 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 well-positioned to supply it, thanks to its dense real-world data and Toss’s expansive user base. Poseidon and Toss intend to prove the model in Korea first, then expand into global markets.
In Their Own Words
“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,” said Changhoon Seo, Executive Director of New Business at Toss.
“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,” said SY Lee, Chief Strategy Officer and Chairman of Poseidon. Lee previously founded the web-novel platform Radish, sold 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.
Be the first to comment