• Conscription to parent company as CEO staff
• Incubation and operation of Kakao Brain Corp
• Business development for AI Business Team (smart speaker & voice assistant platform)

• Acquired by Kakao Corp in 2015
• Rebranded as Kakao Ventures in 2017

• Storage software stack for Galaxy smartphones

• Storage firmware for iPods, iPhones, iPads, and Apple TV

Cum Laude

• Rebellions.ai is Korea's best fabless startup, founded in 2020 by ex- Morgan Stanley / IBM / SpaceX / Samsung / Hynix folks. Boasting hyper scalable/flexible architecture, silicon-proven top notch performance, the team is building NPU accelerators for system trading & AI workload in data centers. Total raise is at 100B KRW ($80M) to date from instutionals Korea and Singapore.
• Participated in Seed, Pre- Series A, Series A rounds

Lase Innovation is commercializing laser particles (invented by Prof. Andy Yun of Harvard Medical School) small enough to be injected into living cells, for scientific barcoding purposes. Laser barcodes to be applied to Flow Cytometry, Microscopy, Single Cell Sequencing for drug & disease researchers to inspect cell or tissue samples better.

• Autonomous driving startup BlueSpace.ai was founded by founders and members of Drive.ai (acq. by Apple) to create perception software, based on 4D lidar tech, no pre-training required, for fleet vans and buses
• Chosen as 2021 NASA iTech Cycle I company
• youtube.com/watch?v=NumYBO…

• Opportunistically invested into minervaproject.com, the backend business entity for Minerva University (minerva.edu), at a later round than Benchmark Capital, ByteDance, and TAL Education

A two part exposition on why Kakao Ventures isn't a "CVC" (Corporate VC) of Kakao

Key interview questions:
Q. 카카오벤처스는 초기 투자자 역할을 하고 있다. 초기 투자란 어떤 의미인가? / 벤처 캐피털이 정량적 지표가 없는 초기 스타트업을 대상으로 투자를 감행하려면 창업가 정신을 중점적으로 볼 수밖에 없을 것 같다.
Q. 스타트업에서 디자인에 대한 인식은 어느 정도인가? 디자이너가 공동 창업자인 소개할 만한 스타트업이 있다면?
Q. 카카오벤처스는 투자한 포트폴리오 기업을 ‘패밀리’라고 부른다. 호칭에서 투자사와 포트폴리오 관계를 넘어선 끈끈한 우정이 묻어난다. 미래의 패밀리가 될 창업가들에게 들려주고 싶은 조언이 있다면?