Socar and Apex Mobility are launching a data business that turns 15 years of accumulated real-world driving data into autonomous driving AI training datasets, signaling a shift toward end-to-end AI approaches powered by diverse, high-quality data.

Apex Mobility will first build and supply autonomous driving data pipelines, then expand into robotaxi services, aiming for vertical integration across data collection, processing, supply, and services by combining Socar’s car-sharing operations with Krafton’s AI capabilities.

Socar collects real-time data from about 25,000 connected cars nationwide, including dashcam footage, GPS, and steering angle, totaling roughly 1.1 million kilometers driven daily to enable daily updates across four-season road environments.

Industry observers see data competitiveness as a decisive differentiator in end-to-end autonomous driving, with Tesla cited as leveraging vast self-collected data, while Socar argues its car-sharing model yields more diverse driving data than typical consumer vehicles.

A key focus is edge cases; Socar gathers over 40,000 accident videos per year and ego-motion data at impact, building more than 220,000 specialized datasets to date, refined into standardized training data via Apex Mobility’s de-identification, time synchronization, and vision-language model-based automated labeling.

Socar’s strategy rests on its large, diverse fleet and real-time data flow to differentiate in the autonomous driving data market by capturing a broad range of drivers and environments.

Park Jae-wook, CEO of both Socar and Apex Mobility, says that in an era of end-to-end autonomy, data quantity and quality from real roads will determine competitiveness, and the company plans partnerships with automakers and autonomous driving firms using its real-time data pipeline.

Apex Mobility will unveil a purpose-built Ioniq 5 autonomous data-collection prototype at the expo, equipped with a full sensor suite to create customized datasets for client-specified regions, vehicle types, and scenarios beyond existing data.

The firms will showcase their platform at the 2026 Autonomous Mobility Expo in Seoul, highlighting South Korea’s largest autonomous driving data platform; Apex Mobility began as a 2025 joint venture between Socar and Krafton, with a total value of about 150 billion won (roughly $108.6 million).