Hyunsoo Kim, cofounder and CEO of Superb AI.
Courtesy of Superb AI
Superb AI, a South Korean AI startup that graduated from Y Combinator, has raised $10.2 million in a Series C funding round led by the corporate venture arm of South Korea’s oldest conglomerate, the 128-year-old Doosan Group.
Other participants in the funding round include new investors Hyundai Motor, Samsung Next, Kakao Investment and existing investors KT Investment and Premier Partners. Superb AI declined to disclose the valuation of the round. The startup’s new funding brings its total to about $37 million to date.
Superb AI’s cofounder and CEO, Hyunsoo Kim, who was on Forbes’ 30 Under 30 Asia list in 2020, says the new funds will be used for general working-capital purposes as it prepares for a public listing in South Korea in 2026.
Founded in 2018, Superb AI provides an end-to-end tool—from data collection, curation and labeling to model building and deployment—for companies that want to utilize AI, especially computer vision. The startup, which has offices in Seoul, San Mateo and Tokyo, says it has more than 100 customers, including the likes of Hyundai Motor, Samsung Electronics, LG Electronics, SK Telecom, Kakao, NCSoft, Toyota and Qualcomm.
Kim, who left a Ph.D. program in computer science at Duke University, sees synergies with its Series C investors, especially in manufacturing. “For example, there are a lot of mechanical parts that go into factories. Currently, workers manually inspect these parts—whether they are moving correctly, whether there are any cracks,” Kim says in a video interview. “And that’s very inefficient, inaccurate and expensive. So we can automate a lot of that process.”
Superb AI’s Series C lead investor, Doosan Investments, is part of a conglomerate that also makes nuclear power plant components (Doosan Enerbility), construction equipments (Doosan Bobcat), hydrogen-powered drones (Doosan Mobility Innovation) and collaborative robots (Doosan Robotics—South Korea’s largest manufacturer of robot arms by sales—which went public in 2023, raising $312 million in what was the country’s largest IPO that year).
A Doosan Robotics robotic arm transports a bottle of juice during a demonstration.
SeongJoon Cho/Bloomberg
Billionaire Euisun Chung’s Hyundai Motor makes cars and its affiliate Boston Dynamics develops robots. Kim says Superb AI’s software could also help with Hyundai Motor’s self-driving efforts. Samsung makes smartphones, TVs, home appliances and semiconductor chips. The conglomerate, controlled by billionaire Jay Y. Lee, has been raising its stake in South Korean robot maker Rainbow Robotics. Kim adds that Superb AI can also help build AI for Samsung’s smartphones.
KT Investment, the corporate venture arm of South Korean telecom operator KT, has been investing in Superb AI since its seed round in 2019. Kim says Superb AI is looking to work with KT to add AI capabilities to its enterprise network offerings and use its cloud computing service to build AI models for companies.
Next month, Superb AI plans to launch an on-premise version of its AI tools that don’t require a network connection to a cloud. “Many companies in manufacturing, defense and surveillance can’t use cloud services due to security risks,” says Kim. Superb AI plans to use Nvidia’s popular GPU chips to train its on-premise models. But for deploying the models, it is considering Nvidia’s Jetson or chips by domestic company Rebellions (also backed by KT).
Superb AI is the latest AI-related startup in the semiconductor hub of South Korea to raise funding even as venture capital deals slow globally. In July, Rebellions raised $15 million in a Series B extension round from Wa’ed Ventures, the venture arm of Saudi Arabia’s state-run oil giant Saudi Aramco. In May, chip maker DeepX raised $80 million in Series C funding led by Skylake Equity Partners, a South Korean private equity firm founded and led by former Samsung Electronics executive Chin Dae-je.
Trillion Labs, which is building a Korean-language large-language model, raised $4.2 million in a pre-seed financing led by Strong Ventures earlier this month. Linq, which uses AI to help hedge funds speed up their research into listed companies, raised $6.6 million in a seed funding round led by Atinum in June. And Upstage, which focuses on helping companies develop language-specific large language models, raised $72 million in a Series B funding round led by SK Networks, the de facto AI investment arm of billionaire Chey Tae-won’s SK Group.
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