The news in Korea’s startup world last week was all about the latest ‘unicorn’ club entrant Danggeum Market. But in some other interesting news, the Silicon Valley Korean startup unicorn Moloco got Series C investment, Korea’s first AI writer publishes novel and Naver Webtoon announces K-Pop collaboration with BTS.
Great example of a next gen tech startup in Korea. Founders are becoming more sophisticated. Getting great experience from 2nd gen Internet companies like Kakao and Coupang and then starting their own companies and producing amazing results. https://t.co/5pCPn60PZb
— Ho Nam (@honam) August 19, 2021
SoftBank-backed Karrot becomes $2.7 billion Korea unicorn.
“Not many of us imagined that BTS could become a world superstar,” founder Gary Kim said. “I want to show that Korean startups can also become successful like Facebook and Google.”
https://t.co/VLBVMZ7Agb— Sohee Kim (@soheefication) August 17, 2021
1st full-length S. Korean novel written by AI to be published next week
Source: Yonhap
South Korea’s first full-length novel written by artificial intelligence (AI) will hit the shelves next week, its publisher said Friday. Parambook publishing company said the novel, written by an AI writer named Birampung, will be published Wednesday under a title roughly translated as “The World from Now On” in English.
Birampung has been co-developed by local AI startup Dapumda and natural language processing company Namaesseu. Kim Tae-yeon, a writer and a computer science expert, directed the AI to write the novel through deep learning process after he outlined the novel’s theme, background and characters, according to the publisher.
The book will be the first feature-length novel written by AI for Korean readers, it said. The world’s first-ever AI-written novel was published in Russia in 2008.
Hybe joins the Naver Webtoon platform – BTS Webtoon, Web Novel Appearance Announcement
Source: Platum
At an online meetup event held on August18th, Naver unveiled the results and direction of its global story tech platform ‘Naver Webtoon’.
In particular, Naver announced that it will expand and grow the storytelling content ecosystem into the core fields of the entertainment industry through collaboration with global content companies. The ‘Supercasting’ project, which produces external super IP as webtoon or web novel original content, was also introduced.
The first collaboration partners of ‘Supercasting’ are HYBE and DC Comics. In the future, Naver Webtoon plans to create webtoons or web novels with original stories in collaboration with various artists of HYBE labels, including BTS, or provide original webtoons using DC Comics’ worldview or characters.
Moloco wins $150 million Series C investment
Source: Maeil Economic Daily
Moloco, a global AI tech company, announced that it has succeeded in attracting $150 million (about 173.4 billion won) of Series C investment.
With this investment as a stepping stone, Moloco plans to expand its unique sophisticated and transparent machine learning model offering to various industries around the world. In addition, for the development of world-class high-performance advertising solutions, the product and engineering roadmap will be launched in earnest, and the company will focus on recruiting key talent. ) and has an enterprise value of $1.5 billion (about KRW 1.76 trillion). Moloco has consistently recorded a growth rate of more than 100% every year, and its net sales have exceeded 100 million dollars (about 117.3 billion won) on an annual basis. The investment was led by Tiger Global Management, a famous American technology investment company.
Venture company employment growth rate is 3 times higher than that of general companies
Source: Venture Square
The Ministry of SMEs and Startups analyzed the employment trends of venture companies and venture-invested companies as of the end of June ’21 based on the employment insurance subscription status of the Korea Employment Information Service. It said on the 19th that there was a significant increase in employment in the first half of the year.
According to the Ministry of SMEs and Startups, as of the end of June ’21, the total employment of 35,482 companies with valid employment information among 38,193 venture companies as of the end of June ’21 was 727,498. This represents an increase in employment of about 67,238 people from the end of June 2020, and the employment growth rate reached the level of about 10.2%.
In particular, as of the end of June ’21, the total number of domestic employment insurance subscribers increased by about 3.4% from a year ago and by about 1.8% from six months ago, but it was confirmed that the employment growth rate of venture companies was three times higher than this.
