A plug-and-play export pathway helps regional brands reach Asia without building overseas operations
Updated
February 26, 2026 4:29 PM
Coupang headquarters in Silicon Valley. PHOTO: ADOBE STOCK
Two western Pennsylvania companies — Kate’s Real Food and Healthy Origins — are expanding beyond the U.S. through a partnership with Coupang.
Coupang, a U.S.-technology and Fortune 150 company, operates one of the largest e-commerce platforms in South Korea. It allows American sellers to reach customers overseas without setting up their own distribution networks. Businesses ship products to a domestic Coupang logistics facility. From there, the company manages storage, fulfillment and delivery directly to customers abroad.
For Kate’s Real Food and Healthy Origins, this system opens the door to new markets without requiring on-the-ground operations. Kate’s Real Food makes organic energy and protein bars. Healthy Origins is a family-owned supplements business based near Pittsburgh. Both are now selling to customers in South Korea and in Healthy Origins’ case, Taiwan as well.
That structure addresses a practical gap for growing brands: how to access international demand without building international operations. Instead of navigating foreign warehousing and retail partnerships independently, sellers plug into an existing marketplace and logistics system.
“At Coupang, we’re proud to help thousands of American small and medium-sized businesses, agricultural producers and larger brands sell their goods to customers around the world”, said Coupang vice president Bill Anaya. “We’ve built an innovative, AI-driven export engine that enables great American entrepreneurs — like those who created Kate’s Real Food and Healthy Origins — to expand their horizons, find new revenue abroad and keep growing their local teams".
For Kate’s Real Food, the move marks its entry into South Korea for the first time. For Healthy Origins, the results have been measurable. The company reports that sales of its products on the platform have increased more than 50% year over year since partnering with Coupang. It has also expanded into Taiwan.
“Partnering with Coupang has been a significant step forward for our business”, said Bret Eby, CEO of Healthy Origins. “Coupang makes it easier to deliver a great shopping experience and we’ve appreciated the collaboration and support throughout the process. Its scale, efficiency and consumer reach in Korea are unmatched and launching on Coupang allowed us to elevate our presence and connect with customers in a much more impactful and direct way”.
The broader relevance lies in the model itself. Digital marketplaces are building integrated cross-border infrastructure. That shift changes what international expansion requires. Smaller regional brands no longer need to replicate warehousing, logistics and retail partnerships in every new market. Instead, they can plug into an existing system and reach customers abroad.
In this case, two Pennsylvania companies are doing exactly that. Their expansion illustrates how platform-led trade is reshaping the path from local operations to global reach.
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Humanoids are moving from research labs into real industries — and capital is finally catching up.
Updated
January 8, 2026 6:31 PM
A face of a humanoid robot, side view on black background. PHOTO: UNSPLASH
Humanoid robots are shifting from sci-fi speculation to engineering reality, and the pace of progress is prompting investors to reassess how the next decade of physical automation will unfold. ALM Ventures has launched a new US$100 million early-stage fund aimed squarely at this moment—one where advances in robot control, embodied AI and spatial intelligence are beginning to converge into something commercially meaningful.
ALM Ventures Fund I, is designed for the earliest stages of company formation, targeting seed and pre-seed teams building the foundations of humanoid deployment. It’s a concentrated fund that seeks to take early ownership in a sector that many now consider the next major technological frontier.
For Founder and General Partner Modar Alaoui, the timing is not accidental. “After years of research, humanoids are finally entering a phase where performance, reliability and cost are converging toward commercial viability”, he said. “What the category needs now is focused capital and deep technical diligence to turn prototypes into scalable, enduring companies”.
That framing captures a shift happening across robotics: the field is moving out of the lab and into early commercial readiness. Improvements in perception systems, model-based reasoning and motion control are accelerating the transition. Advances in simulation are also lowering the complexity and cost of integrating humanoid platforms into real environments. As these systems become more capable, the gap between research prototypes and market-ready products is narrowing.
ALM Ventures is positioning itself at this inflection point. Fund I’s thesis centers on the core technologies required to scale humanoids safely and economically. This includes next-generation robot platforms, spatial reasoning engines, embodied intelligence models, world-modeling systems and the infrastructure needed for early deployment. Rather than chasing every robotics trend, the fund is concentrating on the essential layers that will determine whether humanoids can work reliably outside controlled settings.
The firm isn’t starting from zero. During the fund’s formation, ALM Ventures made ten early investments that directly align with its investment focus. The portfolio includes companies building at different layers of the humanoid stack, such as Sanctuary AI, Weave Robotics, Emancro, High Torque Robotics, MicroFactory, Mbodi, Adamo, Haptica Robotics, UMA and O-ID. The list reflects a broad but intentional spread, from hardware to intelligence to manufacturing approaches, all oriented toward enabling scalable physical AI.
Beyond capital, ALM Ventures has been shaping the ecosystem through its global Humanoids Summit series in Silicon Valley, London and Tokyo. The series gives the firm early visibility into emerging technologies, pre-incorporation teams and the senior leaders steering the global robotics landscape. That vantage point has helped the firm identify where commercialization is truly taking root and where bottlenecks still exist.
The rise of humanoids is often compared to the early days of self-driving cars: a long arc of research suddenly meeting an acceleration point. What separates this moment is that advances in embodied AI and spatial intelligence are giving robots a more intuitive understanding of the physical world, making them easier to deploy, teach and scale. ALM Ventures’ Fund I is an attempt to capture that transition while shaping the companies that could define the next technological era.
With US$100 million dedicated to the earliest builders in the space, ALM Ventures is signaling its belief that humanoids are not just another robotics cycle—they may be the next major platform shift in AI.