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

Dalpha’s founders do not fit the tidy picture of a dropout in a dorm room. By their own account they had already tried and failed once, as undergraduates, and chose to leave the problem alone for a while.

According to a Maeil Business interview reposted on the company’s blog, the four founders are classmates from Seoul Science High School who went on to Seoul National University’s College of Engineering. Kim Do-gyun, the chief executive, was born in 1999 and double-majored in mathematical sciences and computer science. His co-founders are Yoo Seon-bin, who leads the business side, Myung Gi-beom (research and development) and Kwon Eui-jin (operations).

Their first venture, a lifestyle app for university students, began in their sophomore year and closed after about a year. “After running the company for a year, I felt we lacked too much experience,” Kim told Maeil Business. The team parted, in his words, “with a promise: that we’d each study more and gain more experience, and meet again in five years.” A founder’s account published by the Joinery newsletter in 2023 describes the gap: one member spent two years as AI tech lead at a start-up, CNAI, and the others built the development skills the first attempt had lacked.

They met again sooner than promised. Maeil Business dates the founding of Dalpha AI to January 2023. The Joinery piece, written that June, describes the early business as AI outsourcing, with a planned B2B “AI Store” where companies could subscribe to custom AI tools and developers could sell algorithms.

Money followed quickly. Asia Economy reported that the company raised a 1.3bn won seed round and, on 31 July 2023, was chosen for Deep Tech TIPS, a Ministry of SMEs and Startups programme. The selection brings 1.5bn won in research funding over three years. The sources disagree on when the seed closed, and Mercator has not resolved it.

In April 2024 Dalpha announced a 12bn won pre-Series A round led by Mirae Asset Venture Investment, taking its total to 13.3bn won, according to the company’s own post and Startup Recipe. The company said it had built more than 100 AI solutions for e-commerce, fashion, beauty, marketing and content, browsable in its AI Store, and planned a SaaS product to follow. Kim said the company had grown “at an astonishing pace” in a single year.

The model has since narrowed. Kim told Maeil Business that “the direction Korean AI companies should take is individually tailored agents.” The company says it has run more than 400 projects with over 160 companies across manufacturing, commerce, marketing and beauty. Maeil Business reports that a custom agent takes about five weeks to build, at roughly half to 60 per cent of competitors’ cost. That figure is the company’s claim and has not been independently checked.

In May 2025 Kim and Yoo were named to the Forbes Asia 30 Under 30 list in the AI category, as Money Today reported. Both are described as Seoul National University alumni. The founders are now based in Los Angeles, where Dalpha is building XBoost, an AI agent business for Amazon sellers.

Two points of caution. The sources describe the founders as university classmates and later alumni, but none states a graduation year, so Mercator cannot say precisely how recently they left campus. And much of the detail on products and results comes from the company or from interviews it chose to repost. Still, the pattern is plain enough: a failed student start-up, a pause to learn the craft, and a second attempt that found paying customers.

“We’ll give it everything we have to become the dominant leader in Korea’s B2B AI agent market within this year,” Kim said on the Forbes announcement. The base, for now, is California.