Korea’s next tech wave in music to mushroom culture  

Investors on the hunt for the next big thing in South Korea explored the country’s next wave of technology at this year’s first demo day held by the country’s startup accelerator D.Camp on Friday, ranging from music publishing to legal risk management to bio-food technology.

Unlike its usual competition, last week Korea’s Banks Foundation for Young Entrepreneurs-backed D.Camp offered the five finalists of the January D.Day, Korea’s oldest monthly startup demo day, an equal chance to showcase their business ideas to their potential investors for future investment.

Every month, D.Day picks one winner among five to six finalists at a main competition but all the five finalists who joined this month’s contest were offered up to 300 million won ($225,000) worth of investments from venture capitalists and could enjoy various benefits like mentoring and residential services.

The finalists entered the January D.Day after beating other contestants in an audition with a 56:1 elimination ratio. 

Their innovative ideas cover music publishing, legal risk management, cooking robots, avatar creation and bio-food technology.

MUSIC TO MUSHROOM

Steam Music demonstrated its music publishing platform Strawberry Fields at this month’s D.Day.

The startup has fully digitalized the process of arranging a deal between an original songwriter and the song performer, saving both time and cost in music publishing work.

Currently, about 1,300 songwriters are registered with Strawberry Fields, according to the company. It has a library of thousands of songs.

Another finalist was CG Inside, which operates iHopper, Korea’s first software-as-a-service (SaaS)-based law and regulation risk management service.

In Korea, more than 100 regulations and pieces of legislation are amended daily, meaning organizations and companies spend a lot of time and money to manage the ever-changing risks.  

iHopper uses artificial intelligence technology to automatically aggregate and analyze massive government relations and public affairs data, as well as news and social media comments for 24 hours, 365 days to project any future risk from critical law or regulation changes.

The company said the service monitors and analyzes about 100,000 local regulations all day every day.

Ronik, the developer of cooking robot Cube, presented its technology, which is expected to help ease labor shortages in the restaurant industry.

Cube cooks based on a recipe registered online and packages food in the right trays and containers for takeaway or delivery without human help.

As it is a modular robot, each restaurant can customize Cube based on different business sizes.

The company has completed testing Cube of salads and yogurt dishes, which do not require heating, at college cafeterias and a major department store.

It plans to operate a fully automated restaurant from taking orders to cooking and delivery. It currently develops modules that can support cooking requiring fire.

FROMSEOUL operates an avatar studio, in which people can create their own avatars and trade them. The platform called Eden enables anyone without professional coding skills to build avatars, which can be used in real-time broadcasting and a metaverse world.  

It has completed Eden’s proof of concept to develop metaverse content with SM Culture Partners, a venture capital of SM Entertainment Co., and plans to roll out the official service this year.

Mash& is a bio-food tech startup, boasting multiple patents in mushroom culture inoculation and mycelium incubation technologies.

With 25 types of its original mushroom mycelium, it develops functional foods and cosmetics ingredients for its corporate customers.

It is registered as a family company of Korea’s state-funded Korea Food Research Institute.

January D.Day was co-hosted and sponsored by local venture capitalists and startup accelerators, including SpringCamp, SVentures, Bluepoint Partners, The Ventures, Enlight Ventures, IP Partners, Time Works Investment and KDB Infrastructure Investments Asset Management.

D.Camp has been hosting D.Day every month since June 2013.

Write to Joo-Wan Kim at kjwan@hankyung.com


Sookyung Seo edited this article.