LG bets big on promising technologies for future growth

LG Group, South Korea’s fourth-largest conglomerate, is accelerating its investment in promising tech companies across the world despite the lingering uncertainty about the global economy, underscoring its determination to find next growth engines in a fast-changing technology landscape.

According to the electronics industry, LG Corp., the holding company of LG Group, has invested $10 million in a fund run by Vista Equity Partners Management LLC.

Vista Equity Partners, founded in Austin, Texas, in 2000, is a major US private equity firm with a special focus on investment in software, data and tech companies. It has $96 billion of assets under management as of 2022.

LG is expected to invest in future technology companies via the Vista Equity Partners' fund.

Its electronics affiliate LG Electronics Inc. also recently injected 670 million won ($500,000) in US healthcare startup LVIS Corp., the developer of an artificial intelligence-based software NeuroMatch that analyzes brain networks to diagnose and propose treatments of various neurological diseases such as dementia and epilepsy.

The US startup founded in 2013 by Lee Jin-hyung, an associate professor in the neurology, neurosurgery, bioengineering and electrical engineering departments at Stanford University, plans to commercialize NeuroMatch this year.

LG Group’s investment arm LG Technology Ventures is also seeking to launch a new fund.

Founded in 2018, the Silicon Valley-based venture capital currently operates seven funds invested in by LG Group companies. Its total fund assets are estimated at over $400 million and has invested about 400 billion won in about 60 startups and venture capitals worldwide from the US to Canada, Israel, Singapore, China and Korea.

It joined other investors to invest in US startup Inworld AI when the latter raised $50 million earlier this month.

LG’s aggressive move to fund promising technology companies is part of its efforts to remain competitive amid an accelerating technological revolution worldwide.  

It is more efficient to groom new growth engines with startups with promising technologies via open innovation rather than building companies from scratch.

LG has picked AI, bio and clean tech as its next growth drivers.

Its electronics giant LG Electronics recently announced plans to transform into a platform-based company from a traditional appliance maker.

As part of its efforts, the company has committed over $100 million to a startup fund to find new technologies in sustainable energy, digital health, AI and industries of the future.

Write to Ik-Hwan Kim at lovepen@hankyung.com

Sookyung Seo edited this article.