• Sat. Mar 11th, 2023

AI-based voice recognition service

Bywiret

Sep 11, 2022

A startup that converts call centers and contact centers that have a lot of customer service into artificial intelligence (AI) contact centers recently attracted 9 billion won worth of Series A investment. Atlas Labs, a startup that provides AI-based voice recognition service “Centroid,” is the main character.

Atlas Labs, which was established in March 2016, received a total of 13.7 billion won in investments until this investment attraction. In the early days of its start-up, it received 700 million won in pre-seed investment from angel investors and attracted 4 billion won worth of seed investment from institutions for the first time in 2020. SV Investment, TBT Partners, IBX Partners, and DT & Investment invested in this investment.

Among them, SV Investment is the second investment after seed investment. Kang Min-guk, a former director of the AI Research Institute who led the investment in Atlas Labs at SV Investment. I heard Atlas Labs’ charm from director Kang, who wanted to invest in a solid technology-based company.
VC judge from Netmarble AI Research Institute, “The AI startup that is going to be…”
An AI startup that an investment judge from AI Research Institute fell in love with…attracting 9 billion won in cash
SV Investment said it invested $1 million (about 1.4 billion won) in Atlas Labs in 2020, and 1.7 million (about 2.4 billion won) this time. In addition, if Atlas Labs starts to attract Series B investment around next year, it plans to invest a fairly large amount as a scale-up fund. Director Kang said, “Atlas Labs was recommended by the CEO of the lodging platform startup,” adding, “Surprisingly, I was able to easily decide on investment because it was the team I wanted at the time.”

Director Kang came to the venture capital (VC) industry while working on AI research at Netmarble AI Research Institute. With a special eye for AI technology, he naturally attracted attention to companies that secured AI technology. However, most teams with AI technology in Korea try to solve common problems. It is a way of consulting companies to build data or AI models.

Director Kang said, “What I learned while researching at the institute was that it was difficult for startups with limited resources to survive in the competition to solve general problems,” and added, “Only when they can quickly solve sharper and clearer problems in the niche market to get data and learn models again with that data, Atlas Labs was a team.”

Atlas Labs also had good capital efficiency. Director Kang said, “Usually, AI companies spend a lot of money on developers and securing data. However, the company has endured for about five years without receiving investment from angel investment. “It was possible because B2B (Intercompany Transaction) sales were generated by developing a solution by focusing on Korean and Japanese voice recognition, especially telephone conversation voice recognition.”

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