From product registration to CS, 'capable'... AI employee breathing life into one-person sellers

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"Wingardium Leviosa."

This is a magic spell from the Harry Potter movies that levitates objects into the air. E-commerce startup Leviosa AI has adopted this very spell as its corporate vision. The company aims to revolutionize the online seller market, which consists mostly of repetitive tasks, using AI to boost sales like magic.

Currently, the e-commerce market relies heavily on a structure where humans directly handle repetitive tasks. From product registration and price adjustments to inventory management, order processing, customer service (CS), and advertising operations, platforms such as Cafe24 and Coupang require dedicated personnel for each brand that lists products there. As sales increase, more manpower and time are needed, resulting in a structure where operating profit margins decline.

Ju Ha-dam, co-founder and COO (Chief Operating Officer) of Leviosa AI, stated, "After running an online seller business directly before founding the company, I found that as sales increased, operational efficiency continued to drop. When monthly sales were around 30 million won, it took about three to four hours a day, but once monthly sales reached the level of 100 million won, I had to devote nearly ten hours a day to operational tasks."

Leviosa AI was launched with the goal of solving this exact point using AI. The plan is not merely to build an auxiliary tool that makes seller work easier, but to construct an 'e-commerce AI agent' where AI performs the entire operational process on behalf of sellers.

Cha In-hwan (SVP), who executed seed investment from Seoul National University Technology Transfer, evaluated Leviosa AI as "a team with high technical capabilities and execution power that will elevate seller automation systems one step further in the rapidly growing purchasing agency market, demonstrating clear growth potential to realize AI-based operational innovation."

Leviosa AI is a company established last September through the collaboration of COO Ju Ha-dam and his older brother, KAIST AI PhD Joo Ha-ram (CEO).

Since childhood, COO Ju has admired CEOs of large corporations and venture entrepreneurs. In particular, during his time at Seoul National University, the case of Class101, a startup founded by university students from UNIST, became the catalyst for him to embark on the path of a student entrepreneur.

COO Ju said, "I thought entrepreneurship was something one could only do after reaching a certain age and accumulating social experience. However, seeing Class101 created by fellow college entrepreneurs gave me confidence that it is entirely possible in your 20s."

Putting this idea into action immediately, he co-founded the veterinarian home visit platform 'FluffyCare' with fellow university students around 2019 when he was just turning twenty.

However, through his first startup, he also felt the limitations of student entrepreneurship acutely. He recalled, "I pondered why Class101, created by entrepreneurs of a similar age to me, succeeded and what made it different."

Subsequently, he joined Class101 and experienced its rapidly growing startup organizational culture. During this process, he determined that "to become a better entrepreneur, one must understand actual technical capabilities and be able to provide direction to members," and later moved to Danahum to focus on building AI development capabilities.

Meanwhile, his older brother Joo Ha-ram (CEO) joined the startup after being proposed by his younger brother while continuing AI-related research at KAIST. Joo (CEO) recalled, "It was a time when I was deeply contemplating whether the path of a researcher was truly my right path."

Joo (CEO) said, "My younger brother had strong experience in actual business operations and development, while I had strengths in AI research and model development as foundational technology capabilities. Although I had always had a vague interest in entrepreneurship, I became convinced that combining our respective capabilities would create significant synergy."

He also quietly assisted during his younger brother's previous startup, the veterinarian home visit platform 'FluffyCare', by taking on development and technical support work without pay.

In fact, the combination of COO Ju's e-commerce business experience and Joo (CEO)'s AI foundational technology capabilities is currently considered Leviosa AI's core competitiveness. Currently, Joo (CEO) leads the company's AI model development, while the two brothers jointly handle platform development and service operations.

This is the business philosophy concretized by the two brothers through their direct activities as online sellers: 'Do not sell your time; design the structure.'

During his tenure at Danahum, COO Ju started selling on Naver Smart Store on a part-time basis. Initially, he manually registered products one by one, but later wrote code himself to build an automated product registration system. Once he registered about 10,000 products, sales began to increase rapidly.

In particular, he discovered potential in the K-pop album distribution market. By focusing on product categories with high global demand and optimizing detail pages and thumbnails, he raised monthly sales from a few hundred thousand won at the start of the business to 100 million won.

However, the problem was operational efficiency. Since most operational tasks such as product registration, inventory adjustments, order processing, and customer service (CS) were handled manually, work volume surged as sales increased. Especially when monthly sales reached the level of 60 million won, it exceeded what could be managed alongside a full-time job. Consequently, he resigned from Danahum in July 2024 to fully dive into the business.

COO Ju explained, "The situation was similar not only for K-pop distributors but also across other e-commerce industries. For example, in the fashion brand sector, companies had dedicated personnel for each listing platform such as Musinsa, Aplee, and Zigzag, with structures where each platform's operations were handled separately."

Specifically, for fashion brands, besides design and marketing personnel, there is a separate need for staff to handle platform operations including product registration, order processing, inventory adjustments, and CS responses. As sales increase, both manpower and time must increase accordingly, naturally leading to a decline in operational efficiency.

He emphasized, "If AI automates repetitive tasks that require significant time and cost, brands will be able to raise their operating profit margins while focusing more on creating their own unique colors and stories." In other words, brands can focus more on essential tasks such as design, branding, and content planning.

While existing competitors targeting sellers have remained at the level of simple AI auxiliary tools providing only specific functions, resulting in 'semi-automation,' Leviosa AI is currently building a model that processes the entire process—including product registration, order and inventory management, advertising operations, and customer service (CS)—within a single AI agent.

Specifically, the all-in-one AI platform developed by Leviosa AI not only integrates data from multiple sales channels such as Naver, Coupang, and proprietary stores into a single dashboard but also has AI analyze competitor prices to recommend sales strategies and directly generate marketing content such as card news and short-form videos. It is also structured to automatically perform back-office repetitive tasks such as customer inquiry responses and inventory and order management.

In particular, the Smart Store currently operated jointly by the two brothers serves as a key testbed (laboratory) for AI model advancement. They are continuously accumulating data on which products sell well, which titles have high click-through rates, what types of customer service (CS) occur repeatedly, at which price points purchase conversion rates increase, and which detail page configurations are effective.

COO Ju added, "Through Leviosa AI, we want to achieve 'democratization of e-commerce' where anyone can challenge being a seller without entry barriers. Our goal is that just as Canva naturally comes to mind when making PPTs, Leviosa AI will be the first thing that comes to mind when starting e-commerce in the future."

Joo (CEO) stated, "Our long-term goal is to establish ourselves as the most competitive AI agent company in the domestic e-commerce market."

[MoneyToday startup media platform Unicorn Factory]