Top 15 AI Startups in South Korea
South Korea holds considerable clout in the AI space. In 2024 alone, the number of AI Startups in South Korea has touched 865. Seoul has announced plans to improve the reliability of AI-generated content by including watermarks. The government is also planning to establish a regulatory framework for promoting voluntary certification for AI reliability by private companies. Here, we take a look at the top 15 AI startups in South Korea.
Top 15 AI Startups in South Korea
- Lunit
- Riiid
- Moloco
- Qraft
- 42dot
- Rebellions
- Deepbrain AI
- Fount
- Skelter Labs
- Nearthlab
- Neosapience
- Twelve Labs
- EnergyX
- MakinaRocks
- XL8
1. Lunit
Lunit provides data-driven imaging biomarker technology (DIB) for image-based disease screening. The company tops the list of 15 AI startups in South Korea as it has revolutionized the field of oncology by producing AI to detect cancer. The company holds expertise in the medical imaging and healthcare sector. At Lunit, they aim to develop AI-powered software for the analysis and interpretation of medical images, especially in the field of radiology. It assists radiologists in interpreting chest X-rays, mammograms, and pathology slides as well. The AI algorithm is developed to improve accuracy, efficiency, and speed in the diagnosis of various medical conditions.
2. Riiid
Riiid is a global leading AI tutor solution provider that delivers creative disruptions to the market of education through its cutting-edge AI technology. Riiid is known for developing personalized learning solutions using artificial intelligence and machine learning. The company specializes in creating adaptive learning platforms and AI-powered educational tools to improve student’s learning experiences and academic results.
Santa, its flagship product, is an AI-powered mobile learning app that is designed to assist students in preparing for standardized tests, like the SATs and TOEFL. It makes use of adaptive learning algorithms to personalize the study plans for every individual student. It not only analyzes the strengths and weaknesses of a student but also understands the learning patterns to deliver customized study materials and recommendations. By adapting to every individual student’s learning pace and style, Santa focuses on improving their test preparation process.
3. Moloco
Moloco offers a programmatic advertising solution to help optimize the acquisition, retention, and machine-learning-driven campaigns of clients. Moloco specializes in developing AI-driven solutions for mobile app marketing and user acquisition. The platform provided by the company leverages machine learning algorithms for optimization of the mobile advertising campaigns and enhances user acquisition strategies for app developers and marketers.
The AI technology developed focuses on predictive analytics, the application of machine learning models for analyzing user behavior, predicting user engagement, and optimizing ad delivery. The platform allows mobile app developers and advertisers to reach their target audience effectively. It enables developers to increase user acquisition, and overall improve the performance of their ad campaigns.
4. Qraft
Qraft provides AI-powered solution that is customized for various purposes. AI technology provides solutions for investment to financial institutions and investors. The AI-driven platform makes use of machine learning and quantitative finance techniques to draft investment strategies and tools.
The primary services of the company include AI-driven investment advisory services, algorithmic trading solutions, and financial data analysis tools. The advanced machine learning models allow analysis of vast volumes of financial data, identify patterns, and draw data-driven predictions for the financial market.
The AI-based investment strategies allow for the optimization and management of portfolios, and automated trading decisions. It can improve investment performance by leveraging data-driven insights and quantitative models.
5. 42dot
42 dot AI is an AI startup that pioneers frictionless and autonomous mobility services through the development of UMOS. The company is developing a Software-defined vehicle to maintain user safety. The diverse SDV technology made available by this company provides continuous vehicle updates and services based on data to provide a user-centric experience and ensure safe mobility. The company aims to produce low-power, high-performance embedded systems, and autonomous driving software.
It enables users to enjoy a connected mobility experience like smartphones through vehicle software and services.
6. Rebellions
Rebellions.ai develops AI accelerators by bridging the gap between the underlying silicon architecture and deep learning algorithms. Rebellion, a South Korean AI startup aims to compete with the US chipmaker Nvidia in the AI chip market. It launched an AI chip known as Atom to complete projects such as Open AI’s ChatGPT. It is also developing a chip called “Rebel” with the assistance received from government as well as private capital. To co-develop a new AI chip, it has partnered with Samsung Electronics.
As per the CNBC news, the chips produced by Rebellion have better energy efficiency for AI workload.
7. Deepbrain AI
Deepbrain AI provides innovative technology-generating avatars and videos. The cloud-based platform offered by Deepbrain AI enables its users to generate realistic AI avatar videos quickly and effectively. It allows you to choose from over 100 avatars developed by real people who speak more than 80 languages and belong to various ethnicities and age groups. Deepbrain AI makes it easy to find the perfect AI avatar to align well with your brand’s image. All types of content, from educational to training videos can be generated in a hassle-free fashion.
Deepbrain AI empowers businesses and individuals to create hyper-realistic and customizable videos without requiring traditional video production resources or extensive camera work. Thus, making it a valuable tool for content creation and marketing.
8. Fount
Fount company is an asset management Robo-Advisor company based in Korea. It offers an AI-powered platform that invests on behalf of its users based on algorithms and data for people who wish to invest money but do not know much about investing. Its AI-driven BlueWhalte product can analyze more than 52,000 cases of economic data and market indices on a global scale. Then, it automatically proposes a customized and diversified portfolio that can be later modified if required. Its robo-advisor services are used by 20 South Korean B2B clients, including lead investors like Hana Financial Investment, Samsung Life Insurance, MetLife, and Hyundai Motor Securities.
9. Skelter Labs
Skelter Labs produces innovative machine intelligence technology. It focuses on developing natural language processing and conversational AI technologies. Its AI-driven solution is aimed at improving the communication and interactions of humans with machines or bots.
Skelter Labs specializes in creating chatbots, virtual assistants, and language processing systems. These technologies can understand, process, and respond to the queries raised in natural language as well as understand commands given in natural language. The NLP technology was developed to improve the accuracy and effectiveness of automated conversations to give it a human touch. This allows AI-powered systems to be implemented across various industries. These tools empower the business to improve customer service, streamline communication, and enhance the user experience through AI-driven conversational interfaces.
10. Nearthlab
Nearthlab provides deep learning-based software solutions for autonomous drones for the inspection of industrial facilities like wind turbine blades. Its high-tech solution like NearWIND makes the inspection job easy. Nearthlab has combined drone technology with autonomous flight technology to simplify one of the most tedious tasks in the industry. The AI-based autonomous drone uses the AI filming capability to independently spot defects and collect data while following a pre-programmed route. It has additional features like collision prevention and proximity flight that allow the drone to maintain a set distance from the objects automatically. The AI technology introduced by Nearthlab enables safe and hassle-free inspection for both onshore and offshore wind turbines.
11. Neosapience
Neosapience creates artificial beings that can be controlled by text script. It AI technology- Typecast is an online AI Generator that puts emotions in text to speech. It enables empowering your video content with realistic AI voices and avatars.
The creators of Typecast are on a mission to provide anyone with the means to escalate their levels of creativity to deliver high-quality content. Neaosapience creates virtual actors to innovate the media entertainment industry, with a strong belief that neosapience shall be everywhere in our daily lives.
With the wide range of AI characters available to choose from, users can choose an actor and generate the audio content along with it. AI technology can learn the voice features of a specific person and can generate speech that mimics the voice identity, prosody, and emotion of that person.
Just with a small amount of voice, it learns the voice features and generates speech with the same voice identity, also in a different language. Neosapience provides he unique solution for human actors to productize their valuable voices as intellectual property. It allows the consumers to benefit by making their content with such valuable voices.
12. Twelve Labs
Twelve Labs is helping developers build programs that can see, listen, and understand the world as we do. The AI can extract key features from the video, such as action, objects, text on screen, speech, and people. It can transform all the information into a vector representation. Converting into vector format allows fast and scalable semantic search.
Since a video is enriched with various information like movement, objects, sound, text, and speech, for an AI to contextually understand the video, it must extract all this information and should be able to understand the complex relation between the objects and connections between the past and present.
The AI technology at Twelve Labs is powerful enough to deliver context-specific searches and insights, thus replacing the old ineffective keyword tagging. Its multimodality allows one to search for anything within the video, including visuals, conversations, logos, and text. The AI models behind Twelve Labs can outperform any open-source and commercial models, both in research and industry.
13. EnergyX
Energy X has developed an AI-driven platform that allows corporate and individual users to invest in renewable energy projects worldwide. This Korean startup is a combination of an ‘online construction platform provider’ and an ‘energy efficiency technology provider’. It is currently Korea’s #1 in the online construction platform leading in traffic, revenue, assets, valuation, and equity sector. Different from its competitors, it focuses on energy-efficient buildings and carbon-neutral buildings. The service offered by this company makes it easy for clients in any sector to work on energy-efficient buildings. The company renders most of its services for free. Energy X also tops the list in energy efficient technology provider business in terms of the number of technologies offered, the number of kinds of technologies, assets, and equity capital. It stands out from its peers as the technology not only focuses on one energy efficiency arena, but all the energy efficiency technology arenas like energy production, conservation, and management. The technological solutions are both IT-based and engineering-based. Its technology is completely proprietary, and it includes post-construction, cloud-based, AI-powered building energy management as well.
14. MakinaRocks
MakinaRocks stands for Machine Intelligence Rocks! As the name suggests, the company provides machine learning solutions and an MLOps platform that allows acceleration and scaling of the industrial sector to implement AI. It offers two solutions namely, MRXray and MRX CtRL.
MRXray is a critical equipment monitoring and AI-based anomaly detection solution. AI models of MRX rays are well-trained with accumulated data to accurately predict the present and future states of each piece of equipment in real time. Besides this, the AI algorithm can automatically diagnose the stability of the equipment without any need for an in-house expert. It not only presents the data monitoring results of the equipment on a custom dashboard but also can promptly alert the user about any critical anomaly observed in the equipment. MRXray monitors respective equipment through a dashboard by itself, requiring no human intervention. After just 7 days of data connection, it is possible to monitor critical equipment and detect any anomalies in the manufacturing process. MRX CtRL is a data-centric simulator and reinforcement learning-based control optimization tool.
15. XL8
XL8 is an AI company that provides NLP services. It has exhibited its expertise in media and entertainment localization, machine translation, and ASR. It helps to deliver human-like translations with a focus on colloquial speech. By revolutionizing the global reach, it has unlocked new business opportunities.
The machine translation engines regularly undergo rigorous blind reviews by the trusted localization partners of the company. Thus, ensuring the outstanding accuracy at translation. This makes it the Best of its kind in the market in recent times.
The AI machine translation engines offered by XL8 are uniquely trained on what they term “Golden Data”. This Golden Data set is the highest level of training data available. The Golden Data set is made up of media, and entertainment content that has undergone extensive hand-curated processes so that only that data that is perfected by humans is ingested to train their proprietary engines.
Its multimodal translation makes use of audiovisual cues, in tandem with Context Awareness. It picks up on age, gender, and relationship-specific situations. Thus, producing more colloquialized translation.
FAQ
As per Statista, the AI market in South Korea is projected to grow to US$ 15.32 billion in 2030, with a CAGR of 16.94% (2024-2030)
South Korea is a juggrenaut in the AI space. It is also an important manufacturer of semiconductors, which is required for the development of AI.
The government of South Korea is launching new policies and plans to support the growth of AI startups and AI technology for the betterment of mankind. AI humans have also been used in the K-pop industry and have made an appearance on live television.