Circulus Inc.

Circulus Inc. is a South Korean robotics and on-device AI company based in Daeryung Techno Town 6 in Gasan-dong, Geumcheon-gu, Seoul, led by CEO Park Jong-geon. The company says it designs its robot hardware, software and content in-house, and that its name comes from the Latin word for circle. It describes itself as a domestically manufactured robot startup that commercialised its first robot in Korea in 2019, and it reports backing from Samsung Electronics and Hyundai Motor; CB Insights lists the government TIPS programme and Hyundai's ZER01NE among its supporters.

The company's best-known product is Pibo, a desktop social robot just over a foot tall with articulated arms and a 5 MP camera in its mouth. When shown at CES 2020 it ran a custom Linux-based operating system on a 1.4 GHz quad-core processor with 1 GB of RAM and a 3,400 mAh battery giving about two hours of use, and it could act as an alarm clock, deliver weather and news, play music, take photos, recognise voices and faces and run apps from an app store. Pibo is now sold in two forms: as a companion robot for people living alone and older users, and as an educational robot that students program through a web-based tool, Python and open APIs. Circulus pairs it with Pibrain, an on-device AI education kit with courseware, and Canvas, a generative AI platform used in classes. It also runs AI and robotics education programmes and events for children, including a one-day course on building a humanoid AI robot. For exhibitions and visitor experiences the company lists Pion, a humanoid interactive guide robot, and Pidog, a dog-shaped interactive guide robot.

Under a Physical AI product line, Circulus offers ARCos, which it presents as an on-device operating system for smart manufacturing that splits work across CPU, GPU and NPU: vision-language-action and small language models run on the GPU, real-time perception on the NPU, and sensor and motor control on the CPU. ARCos targets Intel Core Ultra Series 3 processors with Intel Arc B-Series graphics in an ASRock Industrial NUC-S form factor, runs fully offline, includes an embedded web HMI and an imitation-learning robot task training tool, and is ROS 2 compatible. The company lists support for the Unitree G1, Fourier GR series, UBTECH and AgiBot humanoids, the Rainbow Robotics RB-Y1, Aeirobot K-Humanoid robots and Neuromeka cobots and AMRs. Its own benchmark figures claim sub-10 ms on-device inference and 16.9 FPS vision on Intel Panther Lake versus 13.2 FPS on NVIDIA Jetson Thor. ARCsafe and ARCeye are listed in the same product family without published details.

In 2026 Intel's newsroom featured Circulus as an Intel Core Ultra Series 3 robotics case, describing its modular open-architecture operating system, Pibo and enterprise AI workstations for humanoid platforms, and showing a humanoid at Red Hat Summit 2026 running Circulus' on-device AI operating system. Circulus also publishes several hundred OpenVINO-optimised models on Hugging Face as an Intel Physical AI partner, and mentions PiCore, an on-device AI board.