[2026 Green Mobility] Kakao Mobility Evolves Beyond Taxi-Hailing into an Autonomous Driving and Physical AI Company

Kakao Mobility Wins Mobility Innovation Award

Kakao Mobility has received the Mobility Innovation Award (Minister of Climate, Energy and Environment Award) at the 2026 Green Mobility Awards.

Kakao Mobility is now moving beyond its taxi-hailing platform, taking the lead in adopting new mobility technologies such as physical artificial intelligence (AI) and autonomous driving. The company aims to transform itself into a physical AI-based enterprise and maintain its leadership in the future mobility market.

Photo by Kakao Mobility

To achieve this, Kakao Mobility is focusing on developing both driving and platform technologies for the full commercialization of autonomous driving. In addition to independently developing all algorithms necessary for autonomous driving-including perception, localization, decision-making, and driving-the company is also enhancing performance by incorporating the latest AI technologies such as deep learning and reinforcement learning. At the same time, it is building optimized technological capabilities for algorithm operation through sensor configuration optimization and module advancement.

The company is also launching actual autonomous driving services. In December 2021, Kakao Mobility began offering an autonomous driving service in Pangyo, Seongnam, using its own technology, allowing any Kakao T app user to directly hail and ride in an autonomous vehicle. Since then, the company has introduced autonomous driving services in five cities nationwide, including Gangnam, Daegu, and Jeju. In 2024, Kakao Mobility was selected as the final private operator for Seoul's autonomous vehicle transportation platform, launching 'Seoul Autonomous Vehicle,' the city's first ride-hailing service for autonomous vehicles, through the Kakao T app. In November of last year, the company also introduced the 'Autonomous Driving DRT Service' in the Sangam area of Seoul.

Kakao Mobility is also building a comprehensive cooperation system with domestic autonomous vehicle manufacturers and leading startups. Last year, the company signed business agreements with domestic autonomous driving startups, collaborating with Korean firms while also conducting joint research and development (R&D) with various domestic and international companies. As part of a government-led national project, the company released an 'AI training autonomous driving dataset' to the public last year, allowing domestic startups and researchers to freely utilize the dataset.

The company is actively applying AI to its platform services as well. Recently, it introduced an AI-powered automatic address paste feature based on Google's Gemini Flash AI service to the Kakao T Quick and Delivery service, and signed a business agreement with Hanjin to jointly build an AI-based logistics network.

A Kakao Mobility representative stated, "We plan to accelerate business diversification based on physical AI as we evolve into a 'Mobility as a Service' (MaaS) platform that encompasses the movement of people, goods, and all services."

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.