Kim Ji-hoon, Chief Strategy Officer (CSO) of LG Uplus, presents at the Shift Up Day held at the Yongsan headquarters./Courtesy of LG Uplus

LG Uplus announced on the 10th that it has made an investment in domestic early-stage artificial intelligence (AI) startups. The company has established a dedicated fund worth 5 billion won in collaboration with deep tech-focused accelerator Bluepointpartners, and it will invest in four promising AI startups. The four startups receiving investments are ▲Fairy ▲Lemong ▲TechnoMetrics ▲AIM Intelligence. All of these corporations were selected through the first round of the ‘Shift’ program initiated by LG Uplus in October last year.

LG Uplus noted, “This marks a significant step toward creating an AI collaboration ecosystem between large corporations and startups,” adding that it has plans to build a substantial cooperative relationship to grow alongside the startups, rather than simply providing support.

The ‘Shift’ program, launched by LG Uplus last year, aims to identify promising early-stage startups in the field of future AI technologies and support their growth through technology and business collaboration and investment, while also innovating the AI ecosystem together. In addition to financial support, LG Uplus plans to provide comprehensive support that involves actual technology and business organizations collaborating throughout the entire process from proof of concept (PoC), technology linkage, to commercialization.

Fairy is a corporation founded by AI experts from Google, developing real-time user information extraction technology for AI agents. Lemong develops integrated efficiency AI solutions for sales and marketing aimed at small businesses (SOHO). TechnoMetrics has solutions that automate the re-learning process of AI models to enable sustainable model operations. AIM Intelligence is a corporation developing security solutions that detect and block vulnerabilities in generative AI in real-time.

LG Uplus aims to establish an ‘open innovation platform’ to connect promising startups with government entities, large corporations, and domestic and foreign partners, centering around the Shift program. The open innovation platform of LG Uplus will support various aspects such as technology and business validation, commercialization, investment-based research and development (R&D), and networking for global market entry, which are the most needed by the startups. LG Uplus plans to officially recruit companies for the second round of Shift starting from the 10th.

Kim Ji-hoon, Chief Strategy Officer (CSO) of LG Uplus, said, “We will focus our AI infrastructure and business capabilities to comprehensively support the core elements necessary for the actual growth process of startups so that domestic AI startups can grow into globally competitive corporations,” adding, “In the future, LG Uplus will continue to develop the ‘Shift’ program with various ecosystem members to contribute to the revitalization of the overall AI industry and become the most sought-after collaboration partner for startups.”

※ This article has been translated by AI. Share your feedback here.