Desk

Korea

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

Korea/spotlight

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.

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.

Black and white close-up of a motherboard with a long memory slot running diagonally across capacitors and traces.

Korea/spotlight

Korea Deep Learning started with public-sector OCR. Its founder was 22.

Jihyun Kim founded the Seoul company in 2019. It now sells document AI to more than 80 clients and has a model that topped an OCR benchmark.

The tapered glass spire of Lotte World Tower emerges from a bank of pale cloud under a washed blue sky.

Korea/spotlight

Waddle, the Seoul start-up teaching a shopping assistant to read intent

Two founders who say they have worked together for a decade built a conversational agent for online stores, signed OpenAI as a customer, and then won its hackathon.