Hyundai invests $781 mn in startups to drive future innovation growth

Hyundai Motor Group's open innovation investment in domestic and foreign startups in fields like mobility and artificial intelligence (AI) has exceeded 1 trillion won ($781 million).

The conglomerate on Thursday said that at Hyundai Motor Group Open Innovation Tech Day held at Hotel Naru Seoul MGallery Ambassador in Seoul, it announced win-win strategies for the startup ecosystem, open innovation results and startup collaboration system.

The group also said it invested 1.3 trillion won in some 200 startups from 2017, when it boosted open innovation activities to develop such companies, to the first quarter of this year. The amount excludes large-scale overseas investments such as in the US-based robotics subsidiary Boston Dynamics, self-driving joint venture Motional and independent urban air mobility affiliate Supernal LLC.

The sectors of the group's startup investment cover a range of new fields from mobility services and electrification to connectivity, AI, self-driving, energy, virtual reality and robotics.

The startups receiving group investment and collaboration include MakinaRocks, an AI solution provider that supports smart factory systems at major Hyundai Motor Co. and Kia Corp. factories; Ionity, a European maker of super-fast charging infrastructure for electric vehicles; and IonQ, a College Park, Maryland-based quantum computing company jointly researching self-driving and battery technologies with the group.

The conglomerate also runs the innovation base Cradle in the five countries of the US, Germany, Israel, China and Singapore to search for famous startups in each country and operates 19 investment funds in major global economies.

In South Korea, the group in 2018 launched ZER01NE as an open innovation hub, with the annual startup support program ZER01NE Accelerator searching for and backing famous domestic startups.

An in-house startup system targeting executives and employees has led to 30 of the conglomerate's internal startups being spun off, with cumulative sales of 280 billion won and creation of over 800 jobs.

Write to Sungsu Bae at baebae@hankyung.com