100 new South Korean AI vanguards to be unveiled

One hundred new South Korean startups at the vanguard of development of innovative AI technology will be unveiled later this month, according to The Korea Economic Daily on Monday.

Korea’s leading financial daily has teamed with the country’s telecom giant KT Corp. for three years in a row to uncover 100 promising AI tech startups in Korea as part of their efforts to foster the growth the country’s AI startup ecosystem amid a rapid digital transformation.

Of 157 Korean startups named by the Korea AI Startup 100 Colloquium project in the first two years, nine have succeeded in going public, and 37 have raised capital in follow-up funding rounds. Some companies have been selected twice in a row in the previous two events.

Wanted Lab Inc., Lunit Inc., Obzen Inc., Vuno Inc., JLK Inc., Maum AI Inc., CrowdWorks Inc., Flitto Inc. and Coreline Soft Co. are the startups listed.

Meal kit producer Doctor Kitchen and AI and cloud computing developer Aifrica have been acquired by other companies at a higher valuation than their original one.  

Autonomous driving software developer startup Stravision raised 107.6 billion won ($79.4 million) last year, while AI chip designer Rebellions attracted 62 billion won in a Series A funding round last year.

Cloud computing startup Atto Research raised 10 billion won in a new funding round in June.

The ChatGPT sensation has led a slew of promising startups to jump on the generative AI bandwagon. As such, it's become more difficult to pick candidates for this year’s 100 Korea AI startups, according to an official with the 2023 Korea AI Startup 100 Colloquium.

Upstage is one of the strong contenders after its latest large language model (LLM) trained with Meta’s latest LLaMA 2 model rose to first place on the latest HuggingFace Open LLM Leaderboard, a standard for open-source LLM evaluation of over 500 LLMs, in August, with an average score of 72.3.

This score beat OpenAI’s ChatGPT-3.5 version, which scored 71.9 on the Leaderboard.

Riiid’s LLM also topped the list early this month, with a score of 74.07, as it prepares to take on leading generative AI model developers.

With its full list of Korean startups at the forefront of AI technology development, the 2023 AI Startup 100 list will be a Korean AI startup “investment 101” that will allow investors to envision the future of the Korean AI startup industry, said a VC industry official.

The list of this year’s 100 Korean AI startups, chosen by AI and technology experts after in-depth evaluation, will be announced during the 2023 Korea AI Startup 100 Colloquium event in Seoul on Oct. 26.

Write to Joo-Wan Kim at kjwan@hankyung.com
Sookyung Seo edited this article.