Seoul's dense night skyline spreads below Namsan hill, with N Seoul Tower lit green at its summit under a deep blue sky.

Korea/feature

Korea's campuses teach founding at scale. Companies are the harder part.

Half a million students took an entrepreneurship course in 2024, yet student-founded companies fell. Seoul and its universities are now trying to move from exposure to venture formation.

China

An aerial view of a city block with rooftops and roads partly swallowed by grey cloud.

The lab is the new garage: how Tsinghua doctoral students became robotics founders

In 2025 and 2026 a run of doctoral and master's students raised hundreds of millions of yuan within months of registering. The pattern says more about funding than about genius.

Korea

A night-time tunnel beneath the curved metal-clad Dongdaemun Design Plaza in Seoul, with small figures walking toward a blue-lit exit.

Four classmates, one failed app, and a 13.3bn won AI studio

Dalpha began as a reunion of Seoul Science High School friends. Two years on, it sells custom AI agents to Korean companies and has moved its base to Los Angeles.

Japan

Misty high-rise towers rise into fog above a wet city street in Tokyo.

The Hongo Pipeline

The University of Tokyo has built the most complete route from lecture hall to cap table in Japan. Tokyo's five-year startup plan now asks the rest of the country to copy it.