Toss + Poseidon turn 30M users into paid AI training data farmers 🌾

Toss users can now contribute voice, image, and video recordings to train artificial intelligence models and receive payment tied directly to what they provide, under a partnership announced June 26 between Viva Republica's mobile financial platform and Poseidon, the data infrastructure project that sources and licenses real-world data for AI. The arrangement opens the AI data market to roughly 30 million Toss users in Korea and marks Toss's first move into AI data, with global expansion planned after the Korean rollout.

Poseidon's contributor application, Numo, is launching inside the Toss app, where users can help build Korean-language training data across voice, image, and video. 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. The two companies described the model as a working answer to a question the AI industry has struggled with: 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 assigns each record a verifiable provenance trail through Trace, its public audit layer, so buyers can see where a piece of training data originated and contributors can confirm their work was counted and paid. DATA Foundation, launched this week from the rebrand of Story, is building this layer alongside integration partners including the human data marketplace Kled, with Poseidon among the largest sources of refined data flowing into it.

The data Numo collects is first-person material recorded by real people in real environments, a category the partners described as among the hardest and most valuable to obtain and the raw material for physical intelligence applications spanning robotics and autonomous vehicles. The partners plan to prove the model in Korea, where dense real-life data and Toss's user base position the country as a supplier, before expanding 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, Co-Founder of Poseidon, added that the partnership pairs Poseidon's data infrastructure with Toss's reach to scale a model that has not existed before at this size.