July, August & September 2023
South Korean tech news in the third quarter of 2023 dealt with items including: Korean ‘small grid’ electricity pooling; South Korea’s large variety of tech, startup and innovation funds; Korea-Australia space launch agreements; and more.
For our other editions, you should take a look at Asia’s tech news, daily, delivered via social media channels, and our Indo-Pacific tech newsletters for a weekly update on the region’s tech news.
Hit the links below for each month’s tech headlines, or scroll down for an at-a-glance overview of South Korean tech news in Q3 2023:
September 2023 | August 2023 | July 2023
e-Conomy Southeast Asia 2023 report – Google, Temasek, Bain and Co
September 2023
CSET: Assessing South Korea’s Artificial Intelligence Ecosystem
- North Korean Lazarus Group hackers believed to be responsible for $41M theft from crypto-based sports betting platform Stake, taking this year’s hacking proceeds over $200M
- South Korea: 2nd Pangyo Techno Valley scheduled for completion by year-end, featuring Metaverse Campus, Global Game Hub Center, Information Security Cluster and more
- GSMA’s Mobile360 APAC Conference 2023 set for Seoul, South Korea, September 7-8, looking at tech including AI, 5G, telecoms networks and more
- South Korea: Neurophet selected for Startup Creasphere APAC 2023, digital health-focused platform from Roche pharma giant and Plug and Play, with AI-assisted brain imaging analysis
‘Should chip funds go to chaebols or underdogs? In South Korea, the question has taken on partisan undertones.’
South Korea’s semiconductor industry first made a name for itself through memory chips. Korea manufactures a staggering 44 percent of these chips that computers use for internal storage.”
“Since then, the country has advanced in other chip segments as well. Notably, South Korea accounts for 8 percent of global sub-10 nanometer (the most advanced) logic chipmaking, with only Taiwan competing with South Korea in that space.”
- Export-Import Bank of Korea inks MOU with Export Finance Australia to collaborate on stabilizing core mineral supply chains
- South Korea: BANF secures $3M focusing on real-time truck tire sensing technology, initially targeting logistics industry in which tire issues account for 30% of accidents
- South Korea: Gov’t unveils ‘Comprehensive Startup Korea Plan’ to boost innovation with funding for deep tech, global expansion support, and private sector-led approach
- South Korea: Hyundai unit partners 60Hz, energy-tech firm working on ‘virtual power plants’, networks of small power-producing and storage devices that can be pooled to feed the grid
Samsung & semiconductors:
“…once TSMC joins us in the race for two-nanometre technology, Samsung will lead the way. Within five years, we can surpass TSMC.”
- South Korea: Panmnesia chip firm backed with IP on Compute Express Link tech which allows data center operators to pool devices including AI chips, processors and memory
- Japan: US Space Force may establish unit in Japan, expanding on Hawaii unit and subordinate unit in South Korea
CSIS: Semiconductor Supply Chains & Indo-Pacific Economic Framework
August 2023
CSET: Assessing South Korea’s Artificial Intelligence Ecosystem
- South Korea: LG Electronics to form $100M NOVA Prime Fund for startup investments, 5 times larger than previous startup fund launched in 2020
- South Korea: Gov’t announces 42 venture funds, selected by 9 ministries, to receive approximately $858M, in bid to boost innovation and support startups
- South Korea: Seongnam city in Seoul launched Semiconductor Fabless Alliance in July with reps from semicon demand and supply firms, industry associations and academia
- SK Telecom, South Korea’s largest telco, makes $100M investment in Anthropic artificial intelligence firm, aiming for multilingual LLM focused on telco-specific use cases
- South Korea’s Innospace and Equatorial Launch Australia ink multi-launch contract for orbital launches in north-east Arnhem Land
“Space firm Equatorial Launch Australia, which hosted three rocket launches by US space giant NASA in 2022, said it had signed a ‘multi-year, multi-launch contract’ with Korean company INNOSPACE.”
“ELA said INNOSPACE would fire orbital rockets from its Arnhem Space Centre (ASC), near the NT town of Nhulunbuy, on the Gulf of Carpentaria.”
“The agreement will see the launch of several INNOSPACE rocket variants each carrying between 50kg and 500kg payloads into low earth orbit from the ASC across a five-year timeframe until December 2028,” the company said in a statement.
- South Korea: Google ChangGoo Program has invested $88M to incubate near 500 South Korean startups to date, in collaboration with the Ministry of SMEs & Startups
- South Korea: Seoul Metro Gov’t to host ‘Try Everything 2023’ startup festival from September 13-15, looking to boost connections with global startup ecosystems
- North Korean hackers believed to be preparing to cash out near $40M-worth of stolen bitcoin, part of $200M crypto hacking haul this year alone for DPRK’s Lazarus Group
On Tuesday, the FBI warned cryptocurrency companies about recent blockchain activity connected to the theft of hundreds of millions of dollars in cryptocurrency by malicious actors affiliated with the North Korea-backed Lazarus Group, also known as APT38 and “TraderTraitor.”
The FBI said that over the past 24 hours, it had tracked approximately 1,580 bitcoin — worth more than $40 million — that the North Korean hackers are currently holding in six separate crypto wallets. The FBI said these funds were stolen during “several” cryptocurrency heists.
- South Korea’s NGeneBio, next-gen sequencing-based diagnostics firm, inks MOU with China’s MGI gene sequencing firm, aiming to grow NGeneBio cancer testing products globally
- South Korean Ministry of SMEs & Startups to open K-Tech College for software training and job placements with Korean startups for students from developing nations
- Google for Startups Women Founders Fund to provide equity-free funding and support to women-led AI startups in India, Japan & Korea
Indo-Pacific Tech News, September 2023 edition
July 2023
South Korea: 2023 ComeUp Startup Festival – November 17-19
- Joint $160M fund created, building on last year’s ‘MOU for Investment Cooperation and Startup Support between South Korea and Saudi Arabia’
- South Korea to require companies that own or issue crypto to disclose info in financial statements from 2024 – quantity, characteristics, business models, accounting policies, profits, volume and more
- South Korea: Production company, Wayne Hills, commence sci-fi movie production using generative AI to deliver script writing, video footage, audio, images and subtitles
- South Korea: An intro to Spacemap, predicting the orbits of satellites and space debris to prevent collisions, with estimates of 1M objects up to 10cm in size currently in orbit
Korea Blockchain Week 2023: September 4-10
- South Korea: Musinsa fashion e-commerce marketplace raised $190M Series C, offering more than 8000 local and foreign fashion brands across 13 countries
- South Korea’s Lotte Home Shopping to intro ‘virtual influencer’ to SE Asia live commerce market, beginning with Thailand via Lazada partnership
- South Korea: Seoul Metro Gov’t unveils ‘Try Everything 2023′, a 3-day startup festival from September 13-15, aiming to boost overseas networks to facilitate Korean startups’ global growth
CSET: Assessing South Korea’s AI Ecosystem
- South Korea: Seoul unveils ‘Comprehensive Plan for Fostering the Robot Industry in Seoul’, investing $158M by 2026 to develop robotics services as strategic future industry, part-preparation for aging society
- North Korean crypto-focused hackers infiltrated JumpCloud, cloud-based IT management services firm, aiming to use this single ‘supply chain’ hack to enter multiple crypto-related firms
SharePass: Online digital security solution
Indo-Pacific TECH news
All-day tech news updates from across the broad – and increasingly strategically and technologically important – Indo-Pacific region, and across South and Southeast Asia:
- Indo-Pacific tech daily on Twitter
- Indo-Pacific tech daily on Facebook
- Indo-Pacific tech news on LinkedIn
Our mobile app is currently offline, due to the ongoing devolution of what was Twitter, now X.
We aim to have the app back online with a much-improved interface and broader functionality by the end of 2023.
World Economic Forum: Space Applications in Agriculture
Indo-Pacific TECH newsletter
Our weekly e-newsletters go out via Substack and LinkedIn, giving a one-glance grasp of the week’s technology news from the Indo-Pacific and South & Southeast Asia.
