WIM Wins First Place at the AWS x NVIDIA AI Pitch Competition (2026.10)
WIM, an AI robot controller company, won first place at the AWS x NVIDIA AI Pitch Competition held in San Francisco on October 6 (local time). The competition was hosted by AWS Startups and NVIDIA Inception and took place during SF Tech Week, presented by a16z. WIM received $25,000 in AWS credits as its prize.
Six teams selected from more than 100 candidates competed in the final, spanning fields from satellite AI and drug discovery to medical devices. Each team gave a three-minute pitch followed by three minutes of questions, judged by representatives of AWS, NVIDIA and Silicon Valley investors. The judging criteria were the clarity and novelty of the problem, the depth of the AI technology, business model and go-to-market readiness, and the quality of the pitch.
WIM presented itself as "the Android for the Physical AI era." Adding AI to a robot today means mastering kinematics, dynamics, motor drives and real-time control, and wiring a separate computer for AI to the device that controls the robot. WIM's robot controller W-RC runs AI and 1 ms real-time control together on a single NVIDIA Jetson. Its robot control software PLEM carries the control knowledge, so developers can connect AI coding tools such as Claude Code or Codex and simply describe the robot and the task they want.
During the Q&A, the judges asked about the business model and about safeguards when software is rolled out to many robots at once. WIM explained that it combines PLEM licenses with engineers who work directly on site with large customers, and that a safety layer inside PLEM judges whether a motion is faulty while letting customers adapt safety policies to their own sites.
"To build Physical AI, you have to know far too much: kinematics, dynamics, motor drives, real-time control," said WIM CEO Woojin Jun. "PLEM is the knowledge base of Physical AI. Our goal is to let anyone move a robot without having to know all of that."
The win comes a month after WIM was named to the Top 10 of the NVIDIA Inception Grand Challenge 2026 in Singapore in September, as one of three robotics teams. Founded in 2021 and headquartered in Daegu, Korea, WIM develops W-RC, an NVIDIA Jetson-based robot controller, and PLEM, its robot control software. Starting with robot manipulators, WIM aims to build a general-purpose AI robot control stack that extends to mobile robots and a wide range of work environments.
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