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The Ministry of SMEs and Startups (Minister Oh Young-ju) agreed to jointly foster promising Korean startups in the AI field through a global corporate collaboration program with OpenAI during a public meeting held in June last year, which invited Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI. In December, they held the 'K-Startup & OpenAI Matching Day' event in Korea, conducting document screenings and preliminary presentation evaluations for 220 startups that applied for the collaboration program with OpenAI, selecting 14 startups.

The 14 promising AI startups that passed the domestic preliminaries took the stage again in front of OpenAI's executives at their headquarters in the US. Following encouraging speeches by Lim Jung-wook, Director of the Startup Venture Innovation Office at the Ministry of SMEs and Startups, and Lim Jung-taek, Consul General of the Republic of Korea in San Francisco, the startups gave passionate presentations, followed by various Q&A sessions with OpenAI executives.

Q&A sessions with OpenAI executives.
After the presentations, based on on-site evaluations by OpenAI executives, three companies - 'MarinaChain', 'Waddle Inc.', and 'Claient Inc.' - received the 'Most AGI Potential Award'.

The highlight of the event was an unscheduled visit by Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI. Altman encouraged the startup representatives and held a Q&A session. The startup representatives asked various questions about GPT-5 release plans, the future of AI technology, AI chip production, etc., and Altman sincerely answered each question.

The Ministry of SMEs and Startups, combining the evaluation results of OpenAI experts and review of support project participation requirements, selected 10 startups to participate in the 2024 Global Corporate Collaboration Program: Asleep Co., Ltd., Claient Inc., DK Mediinfo, MarinaChain, NextPayments Co., Ltd., Nine Watt Co., Ltd., RunKoreanInKorean Co., Ltd., Turing Co., Ltd., Waddle Inc., and WeLaser Co., Ltd.

The finally selected startups will receive commercialization funds (up to 200 million won) from the Ministry of SMEs and Startups, and credits for using OpenAI services, expert mentoring, and consulting from OpenAI.

Minister Oh Young-ju stated, "I hope that the startups participating in this event will grow into globally competitive AI companies through collaboration with OpenAI," adding, "The Ministry of SMEs and Startups will continuously expand collaboration with global companies leading each industry, like OpenAI, to enhance the technology development capabilities of promising domestic startups and expand their global advancement."

Companies finally selected for the OpenAI collaboration program

• Asleep Co., Ltd. (CEO Lee Dong-heon): Combining Asleep's sleep analysis technology with language model technology for work efficiency and close sleep management
• Claient Inc. (CEO Jo Jun-ho): Providing LLM services specialized for bidding using AI context analysis technology
• Significantly improved data accuracy
• DK Mediinfo (CEO Lee Dong-kyun): Nursing diagnosis recording and generation system using virtual patient data
• MarinaChain (CEO Kim Da-won): Scope 3 carbon emission platform realizing carbon accounting for the entire supply chain of shipping, ports, and logistics using AI technology
• NextPayments Co., Ltd. (CEO Ji Kwang-cheol): AI-based smart retail solution supporting digital transformation of offline stores
• Nine Watt Co., Ltd. (CEO Kim Young-rok): 'WATTI', a building energy analysis platform providing carbon emission reduction solutions based on digital twin technology
• RunKoreanInKorean Co., Ltd. (CEO Kim Tae-sung): Providing prompts and fine-tuning datasets to improve ChatGPT's insufficient Korean language level
• Turing Co., Ltd. (CEO Choi Min-kyu): 'Math King', a proprietary math education platform that analyzes personalized student levels and recommends learning materials using deep learning
• Waddle Inc. (CEO Park Ji-hyuk): 'Sound Market', a service based on technology that extracts appropriate product information from shopping mall images and provides voice guidance
• WeLaser Co., Ltd. (CEO Kim Hyun-jong): Shipping document input automation service using Vision AI

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