▲ 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 tailored news items for each reader type.
[Key Issue Briefing]
■ Wearable robot investment: Hurotics, a wearable robot company, raised 25 billion won in Series A funding led by Atinum Investment (021080). Along with follow-on investments from existing backers, strategic investors including Daewoong (003090), NAVER and Lotte joined alongside new investor Industrial Bank of Korea, assembling a lineup aimed at both hospital supply chains and overseas expansion.
■ AI valuation adjustment: As quarterly revenue growth slowed at Anthropic, the developer of Claude, expectations for its valuation came down ahead of an initial public offering. The departures of Meta and Microsoft, combined with a revenue gap from a crackdown on distillation — the practice of collecting another model's responses for use in training — brought long-building doubts to the surface at once.
■ Video AI advances: China's Kling AI officially launched a next-generation video generation model capable of producing 30 seconds of footage at a time, taking direct aim at the professional production market. The model also improves stability in fast motion and complex camera work and sharply expands its ability to combine reference materials, evolving toward accommodating creators' fine-grained demands.
[News of Interest to Startup Founders]
1. Wearable Robot Firm Hurotics Raises 25 Billion Won in Series A
- Key summary: Hurotics raised 25 billion won in Series A funding, pushing its cumulative funding past 33.5 billion won. Atinum Investment led the round, with existing investors including Stonebridge Ventures (330730), Doosan Investment, Aju IB Investment (027360) and Wonik Investment Partners participating in follow-on investments, while Daewoong, NAVER, Lotte and Industrial Bank of Korea joined as new investors. Founded in 2022 by Lee Gi-wook, a professor of mechanical engineering at Chung-Ang University, the company's flagship product H-Medi is a medical rehabilitation robot worn like clothing to assist walking. Certified as a Class 2 combination medical device by the Ministry of Food and Drug Safety, it has been adopted by Severance Hospital in Sinchon, Chung-Ang University Hospital and Korea University Hospital, and was exported to the University of Illinois Chicago in June this year. The company plans to use the funds to obtain overseas regulatory approvals and mass-produce H-Care, a walking-assistance robot for daily use, expanding its business into a wearable physical artificial intelligence platform.
2. Revenue Growth Slows as Meta, Microsoft Exit; Anthropic Valuation Falls $500 Billion
- Key summary: Anthropic's third-quarter revenue reached $16.8 billion, rising from $4.8 billion in the first quarter and $11.6 billion in the second, but the quarter-on-quarter increase shrank to $5.2 billion from $6.8 billion. Over the same period, revenue growth fell 98 percentage points to 45% from 142%, and some investors have begun discussing a valuation of around $1.5 trillion, down from the previous $2 trillion, Reuters reported. Meta and Microsoft switched to their own models or cheaper open-source alternatives to cut Claude's high costs, and Anthropic's substantial reduction in distillation-related revenue in the third quarter — which had accounted for 5% to 7% of its total — was also cited as a factor in the slowdown. Market research firm SemiAnalysis lowered its annualized revenue estimate to about $74 billion, and investors see the near-term outlook for the AI market as heavily dependent on the success or failure of Anthropic's initial public offering.
3. China's Kling Launches New Video AI Model, Winning Over Director of 'Seoul Spring'
- Key summary: Chinese video AI company Kling AI officially launched Kling 4.0, its next-generation video generation model, extending the maximum length of a single generated clip to 30 seconds. The model improves stable rendering of fast motion and complex camera movement, long seen as chronic limitations of AI video, and supports up to 10-bit HDR output to strengthen color and contrast expression. It also adds features that combine up to 15 reference materials including images, video, characters and voice, and allow users to designate 10 key scenes in advance to steer the narrative. Director Kim Sung-su, who made the film "Seoul Spring," introduced "Warm Train," an AI short film he is producing with the model, at the Busan International Film Festival. Kling AI has secured more than 100 million users and some 50,000 corporate clients across 224 countries and regions, with annual revenue of about $500 million (roughly 700 billion won), and has recently been expanding into South Korea through partnerships with organizations including the Korea AI Content Creator Association.
4. CATL's Ningde Ranks Third Among Global Innovation Cities, Beating ASML's Eindhoven
- Key summary: Ningde in China's Fujian province, home to the headquarters of CATL, the world's largest battery maker, ranked third in innovation intensity in the World Intellectual Property Organization's 2026 Global Innovation Index. On the measure, which divides total innovation activity including patents, academic papers and venture capital investment by population, Ningde trailed only San Jose in the United States and Cambridge in Britain. Eindhoven in the Netherlands, where ASML is headquartered, ranked eighth, and Daejeon, home to LG Energy Solution and the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, ranked 10th. Ningde, which had the lowest gross domestic product in Fujian province through the 2000s, saw its GDP swell to 425.172 billion yuan last year after attracting CATL in 2011, with industrial value added contributing 78.8% of GDP growth. Still, the concentration of research and development inside CATL leaves the city's academic output and ecosystem of independent startups and venture capital weak, and 36kr noted that Ningde should heed the lesson that Eindhoven took 30 years to break free of dependence on a single company.
