▲ AI PRISM* Personalized Economic Briefing
* Editor's note: AI PRISM (Personalized Report & Insight Summarizing Media) is an artificial intelligence-based personalized news recommendation and summary service developed with support from the Korea Press Foundation. It selects and provides six news items tailored to each reader type.
[Key Issue Briefing]
■ Manufacturing digital twins: Simacro is knocking on the door of the global market with a digital twin solution that applies AI to models grounded in physical and chemical principles. Targeting process manufacturing sectors such as petrochemicals, steel, refining, food and pharmaceuticals, the company is pitching an approach that bundles multiple solutions on a single platform. A Japanese chemical company became a paying customer after a proof-of-concept trial, and the startup appears to be continuing to work with one of the largest U.S. energy companies.
■ Human-robot collaboration: BrainCommerce has made industrial sites where people and robots work together its new stage, combining robotics with its staffing and contract-work business. Drawing on access to about 900 worksites, the company is accumulating on-site data to supply to robot makers, and over the longer term it is eyeing integrated control covering entire factories.
■ Cutting AI costs: AI startups are rolling out solutions that lower corporate AI token costs, targeting the business-to-business market. Liner and Wrtn Technologies have adopted routing methods that automatically allocate queries to different models depending on their nature, while BoundFor has chosen to block over-budget requests before they run. The moves come as corporate AI transformation (AX) spreads and demand grows for running related budgets more efficiently.
[News of Interest to Startup Founders]
1. Replicating an Entire Chemical Process: Knocking on the Global Market's Door With Digital Twins
- Key summary: Simacro has begun targeting the global market with ProcessModelV, a digital twin solution that applies AI to existing models grounded in physical and chemical principles. "We developed a digital twin solution that applies AI to existing models based on physical and chemical principles to analyze processes precisely and propose improvements," Simacro CEO Yoon Jung-ho said in a meeting with The Seoul Economic Daily at the company's office in Seoul's Gangnam district on the 16th. The solution's differentiator is a model-ops approach — an environment that connects various models and solutions to data for validation, management and execution — that links products from incumbents such as AVEVA and Siemens with the company's own in-house models on a single platform. In South Korea, the company has signed formal contracts with CJ CheilJedang (097950) and Samsung C&T (028260) after proof-of-concept (PoC) trials. Cumulative funding stands at 3.5 billion won, and the company will seek additional investment later this year, centered on global investors. The round is expected to be about 15 billion won.
2. [Interview] BrainCommerce: "Our Goal Is Integrated Control of People and Robots"
- Key summary: BrainCommerce has made industrial sites where people and robots work together its new business stage. "AI, robots and people will inevitably end up working together," BrainCommerce CEO Hwang Hee-seung said in a meeting with The Seoul Economic Daily at the company's headquarters in Seoul's Gangnam district on the 16th, adding that securing data to improve the overall efficiency of on-site operations is the key. After selling Jobplanet last year, the company restructured its business toward combining robotics with staffing and contract work, and it cites access to about 900 worksites as its competitive edge. Hwang also took over as chair of the Physical AI Council under the Korea Startup Forum early this year and is pursuing partnerships with robot companies, with a longer-term goal of integrated control spanning both human work and robot deployment.
3. A Diet Race for AI Token Costs: Corporate Solutions Pour In
- Key summary: AI startups are successively unveiling services that cut AI token costs, targeting the business-to-business (B2B) market. On the 15th, Liner launched Liner Model API, an AI orchestration solution that sends difficult queries to high-performance frontier models and routine ones to lightweight models. The company's analysis found that only about 43% of all queries actually required a high-performance model, and it says allocating the optimal model for each query can cut token costs by more than half. Meanwhile, Wrtn Technologies released the Wrtn AX LLM Router in July through its company-in-company unit Wrtn AX, and BoundFor last month added Pareto, a token spending management service that blocks over-budget requests before they are executed.
[Reference News for Startup Founders]
4. Robot Automation Firm Brills Sets IPO Price at Top of Range at 19,500 Won for KOSDAQ Listing
- Key summary: Brills, a robot automation solutions company pursuing a KOSDAQ initial public offering (IPO), set its offering price at 19,500 won, the top of its indicative range, following institutional book-building. A total of 2,181 institutions took part in the book-building held from the 9th to the 15th of this month, with a simple subscription ratio of 1,187.74 to 1. Of the 855.171 million shares bid for, 98.93% were offered at or above the top of the range, and the share of bidders committing not to sell for at least 15 days after listing was 21.75%, the highest among new KOSDAQ listings in the second half of the year. The company plans to use the 23.4 billion won in proceeds for operating funds at its U.S. unit and for expanding its Songdo and Asan plants. Of that, about 10.7 billion won will be allocated to research facility investment and research and development spending. The KOSDAQ listing is scheduled for Oct. 1.
5. Empty Rural Homes Turned Into a Countryside Getaway Mecca, Drawing 60,000 to a Dying Village
- Key summary: Uptown, a social-gathering tourism content company, has drawn a cumulative 60,000 or so visitors over five years to Pungam 2-ri in Seoseok-myeon, Hongcheon, Gangwon Province. Uptown CEO Kim Sung-hoon said in a meeting with The Seoul Economic Daily at Uptown Country Town in Hongcheon, Gangwon Province, on the 11th that the starting point was the idea of building a business connecting a region and people in an area facing population decline. Six founding members all registered their residence in Hongcheon in early 2022 and spent the first six months taking part in residents' meetings and village cleanup activities to build relationships before renovating an abandoned house into Country Town. Revenue has since doubled each year, from 200 million won in 2023 to 400 million won in 2024 and 800 million won last year, while its food and beverage brand Bangatgan Makguksu posted annual revenue of 1.1 billion won last year.
6. Rebellions to Supply More Than 100 NPU Racks to Japanese Data Center
- Key summary: Rebellions said on the 16th that it has formed a partnership with Japanese neocloud provider ai& and will supply more than 100 neural processing unit (NPU) racks to ai&'s Tokyo data center. The product being supplied, Rebel Rack, packages servers equipped with Rebellions' own Rebel100 NPU at the rack level, giving Japanese public institutions and companies access to AI inference servers based on Rebellions NPUs. ai& plans to run five data centers by the end of this year and to expand its Tokyo data center capacity to 40 megawatts (MW) by the end of next year. Rebellions also supports major open-source frameworks, so customers appear able to use NPU inference services in their existing development environments without switching setups.
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