Participated · Equity · Jun 2019

Konatus runs 'BanBan Taxi', a taxi-based voluntary ride-sharing platform that connects passengers traveling the same direction and enables them to split fares via a 'shared ride' option. Pairing is passenger-driven with no driver involvement, distinguishing it from driver-led shared rides. The app enforces real-name verification and credit-card registration at signup and supports same-gender matching to address safety concerns. Konatus says most of the shared-ride fee is paid to drivers, enabling rider discounts while increasing driver income. After launching a driver app in April, more than 1,600 taxi drivers have pre-registered, and Seoul formally approved the platform call fee in March. The company is incubated by the Gyeonggi Creative Economy Innovation Center's K-Champ program and is preparing for a full service launch in July with continued driver recruitment and partner collaborations.

Led · Series A · May 2019

Allganize provides enterprise LLM solutions including the Alli LLM App Market, the Alli AI chatbot, and Alli for Invoice to help companies automate and optimize workflows. The Alli LLM App Market offers 100+ ready-to-use LLM apps and no-code app creation, with multi-LLM support (GPT-4, GPT-3.5, Llama2, PaLM2) and options for sLLMs and on-premise deployment. The Alli chatbot delivers high response accuracy, document-based QA extraction, external tool integrations, and is offered from ¥100,000 per month. Alli for Invoice extracts data from non-standard invoices without complex setup and supports required invoice items for Japan’s invoicing system. Allganize plans to further advance its AI solutions, accelerate global expansion focused on Japan, the U.S., and Korea, and aggressively hire AI talent. The company was founded in 2017 and operates from Tokyo, Houston, and Seoul; it recently raised $20.2M in a Series B to support product development and international growth. Allganize develops NLP technology that extracts answers to natural-language questions directly from millions of unstructured text documents without manual preparation of training data. The platform can also automatically generate questions and answers from unstructured data. Led by founder and CEO Changsu Lee and based in San Francisco, the company has acquired over 100 enterprise customers in the US, Japan, and Korea, including SMBC, Persol, Kao, JPower, KB Securities, Hyundai Card, and Smilegate. In August 2021 it raised $10M in a round led by Atinum Investment with participation from Stonebridge Ventures, Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation and existing investors, bringing total funds raised to $15M since its July 2017 founding. The company plans to use the proceeds to accelerate research and development, expand globally, and increase headcount in 2021. Allganize develops deep learning–based natural-language understanding (NLU) and conversational AI for enterprise customers. Its Alli.ai conversational AI and chatbot service aims to deliver highly personalized customer experiences by recognizing complex named entities and user intents from chat and voice data. The company leverages proprietary high-performance NLU technology to help companies build their own AI systems and services. Allganize has demonstrated market traction, securing business with Persol Process and Technology in Japan. The company intends to use the Series A proceeds to accelerate distribution of its solution to businesses. It operates from offices in Oakland, Seoul (Gangnam-daero, Gangnam-gu), and Tokyo.