Small but Strong: AI and Data Startups from Leisure to Audio

Distinctive technologies and AI performance data analysis
SelectStar and Trillion Labs participate in the sovereign AI foundation model initiative
Tripbtoz builds a travel video ecosystem
AnAI enables language and voice localization

As the government steps up AI development, including the selection of companies for its strategic sovereign AI foundation model initiative, promising AI startups are attracting industry attention.

These startups are using their technologies to take key roles in foundation model consortia led by large companies. They include SelectStar, a member of the SK Telecom consortium selected as one of the top three teams, Trillion Labs, AI travel app Tripbtoz, and OTT audio technology company AnAI.

SelectStar is responsible for data within the SK Telecom consortium. It builds and supplies training data to improve AI model safety using large-scale data construction and validation technology. Its proprietary Datumo Eval AI reliability assessment solution and red-teaming experience help reduce safety and bias risks that can arise in actual service environments.

The government selected SK Telecom, LG AI Research, and Upstage in the first evaluation stage. In the second stage, the SK Telecom consortium plans to improve the quality of post-training data for its A.X K1 model. This includes designing and validating datasets for complex reasoning in STEM, multimodal datasets for image and video understanding, and red-teaming datasets for identifying model vulnerabilities.

Founded in 2018, SelectStar has reached the Series B stage and raised a total of KRW 43.4 billion. Its revenue was KRW 4.27 billion in 2022, KRW 5.16 billion in 2023, and KRW 8.39 billion in 2024.

SelectStar CEO Kim Se-yeop said that the SK Telecom consortium’s successful first-stage evaluation showed how the company’s data construction and reliability assessment capabilities could contribute to a national AI project. He said the company would continue working to help build a trustworthy national AI model.

Trillion Labs has also participated in the government’s foundation model initiative as part of a consortium led by Lunit and joined by Korean AI and biotechnology companies. After excluding Naver Cloud and NC AI in the first evaluation, the government decided to recruit one additional team, leaving a possibility of selection. The Lunit-led consortium aims to build the world’s first medical-science-specific foundation model.

The proposal, titled ‘Development of a Multiscale Medical Science Foundation Model for Full-Lifecycle Medical Innovation from Molecules to Populations,’ connects molecular, protein, omics, pharmaceutical, clinical, and other medical data in one AI model. Trillion Labs is responsible for designing and developing the model’s core engine and training structure. It draws on experience developing language models with 7 billion to 70 billion parameters and its XLDA (Cross-lingual Document Attention) technology to learn from medical data and support stable inference.

Tripbtoz is a next-generation travel platform driven by AI. It supports faster, more accurate decisions through AI-based performance data analysis. The company says its offering of lowest-price hotels at a rate of 17% gives it a pricing advantage. It is building a travel video ecosystem around user-generated content with clear purposes, such as promotion and guidance, and subjects, such as hotels and destinations.

According to Tripbtoz, it held 560,000 videos as of 2024. Its strategy uses an AI-centered big data platform to build a video ecosystem and make use of video data. This includes supplying systematically classified hotel and destination videos to portals, providing promotional materials to tourism boards worldwide, and enabling hotels to use the videos for public relations. A company representative said it plans to automate the full hotel partner process to improve efficiency and independence.

AnAI is an AI audio technology company founded by audio and AI specialists. The company says it has expertise and technology optimized for AI dubbing. Its VOIX dubbing solution localizes language and voice while using character voices to improve immersion in video content. It reproduces emotion, intonation, tone, and spatial sound, lets viewers choose their preferred language, and provides broadcast-quality results for commercial use. The company says this can reduce dubbing time and cost.

An AnAI representative said its voice design creates natural new voices and improves the quality of a work. The representative added that the company’s team of composers, performers, and sound engineers supports high-quality audio production.