▲ AI PRISM* Personalized Economic Briefing
* Editor's note: AI PRISM (Personalized Report & Insight Summarizing Media) is an artificial intelligence-based personalized news recommendation and summary service developed with support from the Korea Press Foundation. It selects and provides six news items tailored to each reader type.
[Key Issue Briefing]
■ 25 Years of Off-the-Beaten-Path Investing: Kim Ji-won, CEO of Aju IB Investment (027360), invested 2 billion won in the musical "The Phantom of the Opera" in 2001 as a second-year investment manager. Kim later joined the investment in the Korean premiere of "Notre-Dame de Paris," opening an era of commercial capital investment in musicals, and has handled major deals including Bluehole, Pearl Abyss, Carver Korea and Hugel.
■ Race to Secure Robot Data: Config Intelligence says it will directly fill the shortage of behavior data, the biggest obstacle to the spread of physical artificial intelligence, and is operating a human factory of about 500 people in Hanoi, Vietnam. The company trained its robot foundation model CFG-1 using only data it collected itself, and major Korean corporations including Samsung Venture Investment and Hyundai Motor (005380) Group's ZER01NE are listed as seed investors.
■ K-Beauty Store Race in U.S.: Silicon2 will open additional Moida K-beauty multi-brand stores across the United States by year-end, expanding from its business-to-business focus into direct-to-consumer sales. CJ Olive Young is also targeting the U.S. market with large experience-oriented directly operated stores, setting up fiercer competition in the local K-beauty retail market.
[News of Interest to Startup Founders]
- Key points: Kim Ji-won, CEO of Aju IB Investment, cited "the road others don't take" as the basis for the firm's investment success. Kim, who joined in 1999, focused on the culture of repeat viewings among middle- and upper-middle-income musical fans at a time when the investment market revolved around technology, and invested 2 billion won in "The Phantom of the Opera." The production generated 19 billion won in revenue over 244 performances. In 2008, Kim invested in Hugel, then valued at 30 billion won, on the condition that a chief financial officer be appointed, and completed the exit through a sale of existing shares in 2012. Hugel's market capitalization now stands at 3 trillion won. Aju IB Investment set up subsidiaries in Boston in 2013 and in Silicon Valley in 2019, expanding into biotechnology and high technology. Assets under management total about 2.5 trillion won. The firm has set a target of 500 billion won in annual investment by 2028 and plans to raise the overseas share of revenue in its venture capital division to 50% from the current 30%.
2. Building a 'Brain' From Accumulated Data: 'Our Goal Is the World's Best RFM'
- Key points: Config Intelligence, a robot software startup founded in 2024, said it will secure robot training data directly and develop a robot foundation model (RFM). CEO Seo Min-jun and Chief Science Officer Lee Ki-min are collecting 20,000 hours of behavior data a month through about 500 local workers at the human factory in Hanoi, Vietnam, with cumulative data covering more than 400,000 tasks and more than 10 million episodes. CFG-1, trained on more than 100,000 hours of the company's own data, is distinguished by a memory capability that retains information about earlier tasks. Cumulative investment of 50 billion won will be spent on graphics processing unit purchases, hiring and research and development. Korean semiconductor and automotive companies as well as systems integration firms are listed as customers.
3. [Exclusive] Silicon2's 'Moida' Plants Flag Across U.S., Squaring Off With Olive Young
- Key points: Silicon2 is reviewing a plan to open additional Moida K-beauty multi-brand stores across the United States by year-end. After opening three stores last month, the company has one opening scheduled this month, three in November and two in December, meaning it will add more than twice the number of stores it opened over the past two years or so within three to four months. The new stores extend beyond areas with large Korean populations into the southeastern and western United States, including Florida, and seven stores in total will be located in facilities run by Simon Property Group, the largest shopping mall operator in the United States. CJ Olive Young, which opened its first store in Pasadena, California, in May this year, offers free skin diagnostics and one-on-one consultations at the roughly 803-square-meter large directly operated store, and plans to secure at least five stores in California by the first half of next year.
[Reference News for Startup Founders]
4. Riding Sports Broadcasts, Chzzk Downloads Reach 10 Million
- Key points: Chzzk, NAVER's streaming platform, has surpassed 10 million cumulative app downloads about two years after its official launch in May 2024. Chzzk has secured a series of major broadcasting rights, including the 2026 Milan Winter Olympics, the North and Central America World Cup, the Esports World Cup (EWC) and the Aichi-Nagoya Asian Games. As a result, cumulative time spent on international sports event intellectual property rose 25.9% from a year earlier this year, while time spent on other content increased 15.3%. Monthly active users in September exceeded 4.5 million based on Mobile Index data, approaching double the roughly 2.3 million for SOOP. Spotter, an AI technology that automatically extracts key scenes from live video, produced about 3,400 clips from the North and Central America World Cup alone, drawing 120 million cumulative views.
- Key points: Kim Ji-won, CEO of Aju IB Investment, called for a shift in thinking, saying Korean venture capital firms must invest in overseas companies to open channels for exchange before foreign venture capital firms can invest in Korean companies. Kim said raising policy funds for funds dedicated to overseas investment is blocked by sentiment, and proposed unifying overlapping regulations that require accelerators, venture capital firms and private equity firms to obtain separate licenses and meet capital requirements under different laws. Kim identified the shrinking exit market as the industry's biggest issue. According to the Ministry of SMEs and Startups, new venture capital fund commitments totaled 8.4366 trillion won from January to June this year, up 33% from a year earlier. However, unrealized assets are piling up amid a frozen initial public offering market. Continuation funds and expanded tax benefits for business development companies (BDCs) are being discussed as alternatives.
6. First Lab Selected for EU R&D Program, to Build Ultrasonic Wastewater Treatment System
- Key points: First Lab, a developer of ultrasonic chemical decomposition equipment, has been selected as a lead institution for Eurostars 3, a European international joint research and development program. Eurostars 3 is an international R&D support program exclusively for small and medium-sized enterprises, jointly operated by the European Union's Horizon Europe research and innovation program and Eureka. First Lab has formed a consortium with Swedish water treatment module company DABCE to jointly develop a mobile per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) wastewater treatment system over three years. Its ultrasonic equipment Cavitox uses the energy released when microbubbles burst to break the carbon-fluorine bonds in PFAS, treating the substances without oxidizing agents. Meanwhile, demand for on-site decomposition technology is growing as France and other European countries introduce PFAS discharge levies and tighten discharge standards.
