South Korea’s aspiration to become a tech and startup powerhouse got a strong endorsement as President Moon Jae-in announced a special fund worth 1 trillion won (US$850 million) at the ‘K + Venture’ (K Adventure) event. Also, in the news, US venture firm 500 startups announce its ‘Seed program,’ Korean car seat fabric maker Kolon Group to invest in space technology through startup InnoSpace, and Korean AI startup Upstage wins a gold medal at the world competition. To look forward to the next week is Startup Alliance’s ‘Startup and ESG’ talk concert.
Moon presents S. Korea’s ‘venture powerhouse’ vision, vows full gov’t support
Source: Yonhap
President Moon Jae-in said on August 26 that the government will provide complete support for South Korea’s high-tech startups and entrepreneurial ventures as the country aims to emerge as one of the world’s four major venture powerhouses. He pledged to expand support for investments in venture firms via the creation of a special fund worth 1 trillion won (US$850 million), speaking during a Cheong Wa Dae event, titled “K+Venture (K Add Venture).”
The government will make sure South Korea joins the top four of the world’s venture powers through full support — from business launch, growth, recovery to re-challenge, Moon said. “Support for venture investment will further increase,” he added. “The government will also create a new fund worth 1 trillion won in order to expand the high-risk early stage of investment in startups.”
500 Startups, Accelerating Program Recruitment for Fall 2021 ‘Seed Program’
Source: Platum
500 Startups, a venture capital firm based in Silicon Valley, USA, is recruiting companies to participate in the ‘ Seed Program ‘ in the fall of 2021 . The seed program is an accelerator program launched in 2020 to commemorate the 5th anniversary of 500 startups entering Korea. This is a program that provides a framework that can be applied to mentoring and practical work so that you can focus on product building and hypothesis verification before the seed investment stage. So far, a total of 3 seed programs have been operated and a total of 12 startups have been produced.
Kolon Glotech invests W6b in satellite projectiles, eyes on space business
Source: Korea Herald
Kolon Glotech, the car seat fabric maker under Kolon Group, plans to enter the aerospace business by forging strategic partnerships with local startups. The company said on August 26 it has invested 6 billion won ($5.1 million) in Innospace, a South Korean aerospace manufacturing tech startup, to develop light-weight composite materials used in the launch vehicles of small satellites.
Kolon says its foray into the aerospace business is a result of the many composite material producing technology Kolon Glotech has accumulated over the years in making materials for automobiles, planes and defense materials.Established in 2017, Innospace is the only company in South Korea with the technology to develop commercial projectiles.
Upstage wins gold medal in global AI competition
Source: Financial News
Upstage, an Artificial Intelligence ( AI ) startup, wins a gold medal in the competition Kaggle, the world’s most popular online AI contest , with 6 million participants from 194 countries . This World Artificial Intelligence Contest is a ‘CommonLit Readability Prize’contest hosted by CommonLit, a non-profit educational technology organization in the United States.
Upstage, raised performance to the next level by developing a machine learning algorithm that added a language model to understand the text context to the existing statistical features. With this gold medal, Master Yunsu Kim became the youngest to be named the 6th Kaggle Grandmaster in Korea. Master Yunsu Kim, is an undergraduate student at Seoul National University, is attending an Upstage global residency program. In this competition, which took place for about three months from May, 3,600 teams participated and competed in AI technology, and the Upstage team (Leader Sang-Hoon Kim, Yun-Soo Kim) won the gold medal.
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