The Number One AI Company in Korea

“We are the number one company in deep learning based artificial intelligence search technology. "

Korea is an IT (information and communication) leading country recognized by worldwide. However, in the field of artificial intelligence (AI), investment, technology and patents are far behind in the United States and China. President Moon Jae-in also presented a vision of the “AI number 1 nation” at the report of the Ministry of Science and ICT and Communications Commission at the Korea Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI), Daejeon on December 16 and mentioned that "South Korea is not the leader in the Artificial intelligence yet."

"South Korea has sufficient potential to become a leader in AI," he said. "The government will actively support unicorn companies (corporate value of 1 trillion won) in the field of artificial intelligence."

South Korea is not yet an “AI No. 1 country”, but there is “AI No.1 company” in Korea which is 42Maru, a deep-learning-based artificial intelligence search system company. 42Maru (CEO Dong-Hwan Kim) placed Co-rank #1 with Google in the 2018 Machine Reading Comprehension competition called 'SQuAD (Stanford Question and Answering Dataset) 2.0', against Microsoft, IBM, Alibaba, and other global companies.

SQuAD is a competition that attracts a large number of global companies from home and abroad to participate in the MRC (Machine Reading Comprehension) test, where a computer reads and understands a given document like a human and finds the correct answer to a question. 42Maru won first place in this competition and was recognized for its technical competence.

Kim Dong-hwan, CEO of 42Maru, said, "42Maru is the conversation artificial intelligence of Deep Semantic QA platform, which boasts the world's highest response rate," and boasted that we are the top AI company.

42Maru, a group of experts with more than 20 years of experience in the search field alone, is challenging to transform the paradigm of search innovatively by applying artificial intelligence technology. Kim himself is a former head of Nate's search engine development division.

Kim is well known in the industry as a workaholic. In fact, during the project development phase, he often slept in a sauna near the company and cling to projects instead of going home. Recently, he created an inside space for accommodation in the company.

42Maru's Deep Semantic QA platform was applied to SoftBank's artificial intelligence robot 'Pepper' and SK Innovation's chatbot for recruiting. Also, Kia Motors' artificial intelligence-based unmanned test drive service applied 42Maru's interactive artificial intelligence. In addition, 42Maru is selected for Samsung Electronics C Lab outside.

In addition, Daewoo Shipbuilding & Marine Engineering's “AI-based ship sales support design system” and LG U + 's “Kids Watch” applied 42Maru's Deep Semantic QA platform and recognized for its excellence in technology.

When asked if he could grow up as an AI unicorn company, Kim said, “42Maru is now in the scale-up phase, and beyond that level, it can grow as a unicorn company.”

“Until now, there are no successful cases where a domestic software company has advanced overseas, but 42Maru wants to make the first successful cases of overseas expansion,” he said.

42maru’s main investors are Spring Camp (Subsidiary company of Naver), Techstars (Europe's largest accelerator) and Daily Partners.