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"To ensure your challenges bear fruit as tangible business value, we will spare no effort in providing practical support, including PoC (Proof of Concept) execution grants and cloud infrastructure."
Ok Il-jin, Executive Vice President of Woori Financial Holdings (Head of Digital Innovation), stated on the 3rd at the 'Dino Lab Tech Cohort 1' inauguration ceremony held at Dino Lab Tech Center in Gwanak-gu, Seoul: "The Dino Lab Tech Center opening today is a venue for practical collaboration where our financial group's actual business challenges meet your innovative technologies," and added this.
Dino Lab (Digital Innovation Lab) is Woori Financial's startup accelerator program designed to help 'small startups grow like large dinosaurs.' To date, it has identified and nurtured 231 companies and facilitated investments totaling 503.9 billion won.
The newly opened Tech Center serves as a hub dedicated to PoCs for deep-tech startups. Based on the Dino Lab network, which has expanded to seven locations including six in Korea and Hanoi, Vietnam, it will be the starting point for an open innovation experiment directly connecting technical challenges of Woori Financial group companies with the technological capabilities of startups.
The differentiating factor of the Tech Center lies in its collaboration model. While the existing Dino Lab first identified promising companies and then sought business cooperation, the Tech Center has adopted a 'challenge-first presentation' model that first defines technical challenges to be solved by group company frontline departments and then seeks partners to solve them.
A Woori Financial official stated: "We proposed tech challenges needed by group companies first and selected startups to solve them together," adding, "In addition to regular annual recruitment, we plan to recruit additional companies on an on-demand basis according to group company needs."
The support method is also focused on PoCs. Along with execution grants of up to 30 million won per challenge, cloud credits worth 10 million won in cooperation with Naver Cloud and Amazon Web Services (AWS), as well as space within the Tech Center, will be provided.
Collaboration will proceed in five stages: △challenge concretization, △confirmation of task specifications and agreement, △approximately 16-week PoC, △performance verification, and △performance sharing. For companies with excellent results, we plan to link them to actual technology adoption by group companies and fund investments.
A follow-up investment system is also in place. Woori Financial established the 'Dino Lab Fund III' worth 20 billion won last April and has equipped a support structure for each growth stage, including follow-up investment by Woori Venture Partners and IPO (initial public offering) support by Woori Investment & Securities.
For this Tech Cohort 1, four AI startups were selected: △Mentat, △Axelerator, △Walker Holdings, and △Pikab Labs. They will be matched one-to-one with Woori Bank, Dongyang Life Insurance, Woori Investment & Securities, and Woori FIS (FIS) to conduct PoCs.
Mentat, a company specializing in AI agent platforms for regulated industries, will create a 'tax-saving guide customized based on tax law information' with the Woori Bank AI Data Business Division. The core lies in combining legal knowledge graphs and agent execution engines with customer asset and transaction data.
Axelerator, an ontology-based AI platform company, will build an 'AI market sensing system' with Dongyang Life Insurance. This task involves collecting and standardizing competitor terms and public disclosures/marketing materials to automatically generate analysis dashboards and reports containing Impact Scores for each product's market influence.
Walker Holdings, a company specializing in solutions for processing stock market source data, will develop an 'AI Research Analyst' with Woori Investment & Securities. The goal is to create a system that automates market condition summaries and report generation to immediately produce domestic and international market analysis materials.
Pikab Labs, an AI solution company connecting internal corporate documents and work systems, will embark on document automation with Woori FIS. The PoC goal is to integrate scattered data from electronic approvals and emails into a unified search and automatically generate proposals and reports, reducing writing time by more than 50%.
Executive Vice President Ok Il-jin emphasized: "Through this connection platform established by Woori Financial, we hope that startups' innovative technologies can move forward to an even larger world," adding, "We will accompany this journey to the end as true symbiotic partners who think together and grow together."
[MoneyToday startup media platform 'Unicorn Factory']
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