Toss, the mobile financial platform operated by Viva Republica with roughly 30 million users, has announced a partnership with Poseidon, a data infrastructure provider for AI, to allow everyday users to contribute real‑world data for AI training and get paid. The first‑of‑its‑kind model is launching in Korea before global expansion.
Poseidon’s contributor app, Numo, will be integrated directly inside the Toss app. Toss users can now help build Korean‑language training datasets across voice, image, and video, receiving payments tied directly to their contributions. Poseidon provides the infrastructure to track each contribution and its value, while Toss provides the user base and the financial rails to convert participation into earnings.
Every contribution made through Numo is registered on DATA, the AI data network that Poseidon uses to refine and license real‑world data. DATA gives each record a verifiable provenance trail via its public audit layer called Trace, so buyers can see the origin of training data and contributors can verify 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 like the human data marketplace Kled.
The data collected is first‑person data—recorded by real people in real environments—a category that is both difficult to obtain and highly valuable for physical‑intelligence AI applications like robotics and autonomous vehicles. Demand from global AI labs is climbing, and Poseidon and Toss aim to prove the model in Korea before expanding globally.
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, added: “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.”
Poseidon raised a $15 million seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). Its Numo app has already recorded more than 711,000 data registrations worldwide. The partnership marks Toss’s first move into AI data and opens the market to millions of users, potentially accelerating the use of the DATA network and its associated token.
