South Korea’s next AI unicorns stood out at KPAS 2024
Joo-Wan Kim
5 HOURS AGO
South Korea’s major telecom company KT Corp. and the country’s leading financial newspaper The Korea Economic Daily have teamed up to discover the country’s next unicorns with promising artificial intelligence technologies expected to innovate the country’s AI ecosystem.
At the Korea Promising AI Startups (KPAS) 2024 jointly hosted by KT and The Korean Economic Daily on Thursday, 20 AI startups expected to be Korea’s next unicorns were unveiled with great fanfare.
Through thorough reviews by venture capitalists and local AI industry experts, they are chosen for their technologies, which are expected to create great synergy with other industries such as cloud and chip technologies and open new markets.
Their enterprise value is estimated at between 100 billion won ($73 million) and 700 billion won, and some of them have already been actively leading digital transformation at various industrial sites in Korea.
AI SERVICE
Nearly half of the finalists offer AI services designed to empower other industrial processes through automation and prediction systems.
Ineeji offers AI programs that can improve efficiency across manufacturing processes and save energy.
Daim Research has developed an AI and digital twin technology-powered factory platform that enables autonomous logistics robot operation and management.
Datarise offers AI-powered data analytics and customer relationship management (CRM) services for financial and retail customers.
Imagoworks has automated dental treatments using AI, computer-aided design (CAD) and cloud technologies, while Roen Surgical has developed Zamenix, an advanced flexible endoscopic surgical robot system.
Hyper Accel is accoladed for its LLM processing unit (LPU), an AI chip designed for transformer-based LLM.
It is joined by two other AI chip-developing peers in the AI chip sector – MetisX, which develops a compute express link (CXL)-based memory chip needed for large-scale data processing such as AI big data, and Dnotitia, a vision language model developer, which is currently developing an AI-supported medical imaging analysis system jointly with one of the country’s major university hospital.
The 20 finalists of the KPAS 2024, which is the first of its kind, will receive support from KT and The Korean Economic Daily for fundraising, consulting services for technology development and commercialization, as well as marketing and promotion services.
Write to Joo-Wan Kim at kjwan@hankyung.com Sookyung Seo edited this article.