Generative AI startup Wrtn attracts nearly $12 mn in investment

South Korea's advanced tech startup Wrtn Technologies, a major player in generative artificial intelligence (AI), has attracted investment of 15 billion won ($11.8 million) thanks to the recent ChatGPT boom. 

Venture capital sources on Thursday said Wrtn secured the Series A investment from ZVC, an investment company of the Naver-Softbank joint venture Z Holdings, Capstone Partners, KB Securities, Hana Securities and Hana Bank.

With the latest injection being its first investment since 4.5 billion won in pre-Series A investment in November last year, Wrten has attracted cumulative investment of 20 billion won.

A major competitor on the domestic generative AI market, Wrtn has as its main services OpenAI's GPT-4, Naver's HyperClova and Wrtn 2.0, an all-in-one platform based on the company's own language model. In a first in the country, it also created an AI plug-in platform.

Wrtn has generated more than 2.2 billion Korean words, with a user simply entering keywords to create sentences for the desired situation. Marketers, creators and small entrepreneurs facing difficulty in writing can easily create text for advertising, email for business and blogs.

In January, such technology earned the company an Innovation Award at CES, the world's largest home appliance and information and communications technology exhibition in Las Vegas.

The explosion of the generative AI market thanks to the ChatGPT craze has attracted large-scale investment to the sector. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who recently visited Korea, conveyed his intent to collaborate with Korean companies.

The corporate value of his company is an estimated 50 trillion won.

"Even in a severely cold season, investment is pouring into promising startups in fields that are considered future growth industries like generative AI," a venture capital source said. "Wrtn raised its corporate value more than 500% from the previous investment round."

Write to Jong-Woo Kim at jongwoo@hankyung.com