Sangmin Park runs Hyundai M Systems, a small Suwon company that puts cameras and radar on heavy machinery. Its customers are Volvo and Hyundai. Its goal is bigger than its headcount.
A construction site is one of the few workplaces where the machinery can weigh more than the building. An excavator swings, a wheel loader reverses, a forklift pivots - and somewhere in the blind spot behind it, a person is walking. That gap between what an operator can see and what is actually there is where Sangmin Park has built a company.
Park is the CEO of Hyundai M Systems - in Korean, 현대엠시스템즈(주) - a company based in Suwon, south of Seoul. It is not large. It does not make the machines. What it makes is the part that lets the machine notice you before it hurts you: cameras, radar, controllers and the software that ties them together.
The idea sounds simple. The execution is not. And the customer list is what makes people look twice.
“Through continuous technology development and quality innovation, we aim to become the world’s number one in the construction-equipment safety-system field.”
Sangmin Park, CEO, Hyundai M SystemsHyundai M Systems was founded in 2003. For its first decade and a half, it lived where a lot of Korean manufacturers live - supplying components and telematics for construction equipment, useful and largely invisible. The turn came in 2017, when Hyundai M Partners took a 75.9% stake and folded the company into the Hyundai Mirae-ro Group.
That was also the year the company started building AI-based safety solutions in earnest. The bet underneath it: safety on a job site should not be a sticker or an aftermarket bolt-on. It should be built into the machine at the factory, the same way seatbelts became part of a car rather than an accessory.
The company’s catalogue reads like a list of accident types, each with an unglamorous acronym. That is not a marketing failure - it is the point. Every product maps to a specific way heavy equipment injures people.
Around View Monitor with Rear Detection System. Stitches cameras into a 360-degree view and layers radar on top to spot a worker approaching from behind.
Detects when a person enters the danger zone and gives the operator real-time video and a warning, cutting the concentration load in busy sites.
Flags when a machine is at risk of tipping or is carrying an unsafe load, alerting the operator before stability is lost.
Rather than buy the sensing off the shelf, the team went deeper and developed its own 24GHz FMCW/CW dual-mode radar chip and module. That is an unusual choice for a company this size - hardware is expensive and slow. But when your product is the thing that decides whether an operator sees a worker in time, the sensor is not a place to compromise.
“The best safety technology is the kind nobody notices - no alarm, no accident, no headline.”
The quiet math of the businessHere is the part that is hard to shrug off. From November 2023, Hyundai M Systems began mass-supplying high-resolution cameras and intelligent safety systems for next-generation excavators built at Volvo Construction Equipment’s Changwon plant. Its other anchor customer is Hyundai (HD) Construction Equipment. The systems ride on excavators, wheel loaders and forklifts.
A small company in Suwon does not usually sit inside the newest machines of two of the biggest names in heavy equipment. Getting there took years of being the reliable, unglamorous supplier - and then having something the giants actually wanted to build in.
Investors do not back construction-parts suppliers for hype. They back them because the safety mandate on job sites is not going away and someone has to build the hardware. In 2021, Hyundai M Systems raised a 3 billion won Series A from POSCO Technology Investment and Korea Asset. Then in July 2024 came the round that put the company on the radar: a 5 billion won Series B, with Friend Investment Partners putting in 3 billion won and Albatross Investment 2 billion won.
“Based on this investment, we plan to expand mass-production volume, secure product quality and production competitiveness, and begin developing additional competitive products.”
Sangmin Park, on the Series BThe plan Park has laid out is a straight line drawn patiently. Supply to Volvo’s Korean plant first. Then, in the second half of 2024, supply to a factory in Germany. Then, in 2025, walk the products onto the floor at Bauma - the enormous Munich trade fair where the world’s equipment makers gather - to win new customers.
It is the unglamorous path, and it is often the durable one. There is no pivot here, no repositioning, no sudden leap into a hotter market. There is a components maker that decided its future was safety, built the sensor itself, and kept shipping until the biggest buyers in its industry started designing it in.
Whether “world number one” is realistic for a company with a small headcount is a fair question. But the ambition tells you how Park sees the work. He is not selling a gadget. He is trying to make it so that a machine capable of killing someone is, by default, a machine that watches out for them first.