AI, SaaS rule October D.Day with Amber Road snagging top spot

Amber Road won this month’s D.Day, South Korea’s oldest monthly startup pitch competition held on Thursday, with its artificial intelligence-powered manufacturing productivity-boosting program, announced the demo day organizer D.Camp on Friday.

The Korean startup has developed Miner Report, software designed to improve manufacturing productivity.

Its machine learning-backed operation solution has already proven outstanding productivity-improving performance in a special projection carried out jointly with the country’s steel giant POSCO Holdings Inc. by halving the processing time.

With this easy-to-use tool requiring only manufacturing process data input, users can detect any defect in a product in advance and improve productivity through various manufacturing steps.

The company founded by Im Eon-ho was an in-house startup of POSCO and spun off as an independent startup in January this year.

Amber Road is eligible for up to 300 million won ($222,000) in investment from D.Camp and free office space at D.CAMP or FRONT1, startup support centers in Seoul operated by the Korean startup accelerator for a maximum of one year.

The other top-five finalists are eligible for the same benefits, and all the finalists of the pitch race are given an annual voucher worth 20 million won to use Naver Cloud’s cloud services and opportunities to collaborate with Naver Corp.'s affiliates.

The Korean internet giant’s cloud computing company co-sponsored D.Day in October.

AI AND SAAS LEAD

AI and Software as a Service (SaaS) were at the center of this month’s D.Day, reflecting the latest AI boom.

Of the top finalists, Fika.d services an AI-powered data analytics program that can help e-commerce operators maximize conversion rates.

The company already offers its solution to numerous local direct-to-consumer (D2C) companies with more than 10 billion won in sales and aims to foray into Japan and other parts of the world.

Kokkanlogis has developed Primo, an AI-backed freight mobility platform that connects shippers and truck drivers for cargo services.

Since it opened the service in March, it has attracted Korea’s major companies in the retail, telecommunications and cosmetics sectors and earned 310 million won in cumulative sales until September.

Pairy offers Sales Clue, a SaaS program for business-to-business (B2B) sales and marketing solution that allows users to monitor clients’ real-time responses to their business proposals.

Its beta service was launched in November last year and introduced the first paid service in June. Of its about 150 clients, SK Planet Co. and Toss Payments Co. use the paid service.

SpaceVision operates Attention:d, an AI-backed outdoor billboard advertising platform that analyzes the age, gender and fashion of people passing the billboard ad with its compute vision technology and provides the analysis data for targeted ads.

With its patented technology, the platform can also avoid any privacy violation issue, the company said.

Aicy’s SaaS program enables quick analysis of an accounting ledger and writes up a financial report with visualized data in graphics or tables. It plans to advance into North America in 2024.

The Banks Foundation for Young Entrepreneurs-backed D.Camp has been hosting D.Day every month since June 2013.

This month’s pitch recorded a 16:1 competition.

Write to Sookyung Seo at skseo@hankyung.com

Jennifer Nicholson-Breen edited this article.