While South Korea’s AI sector is thriving with significant funding rounds and rapid growth, India is facing a decline in funding for AI startups. South Korea boasts over 1,100 AI startups with no unicorns yet, while India is home to over 750 AI startups and saw its first unicorn in early 2024.
The landscape of AI startups in India and South Korea presents a tale of contrasting fortunes. In South Korea, the AI sector is witnessing rapid growth, highlighted by significant funding rounds for startups. Rebellions, a South Korean fabless AI chip startup, raised $124 million in a Series B round, bringing their total funding to $210 million. As of 2024, South Korea boasts 1,101 AI startups, including notable names like KRAFTON AI, Mathpresso, Zig Zag, Lunit, and Channel Talk.
Conversely, AI startups in India are experiencing a decline in funding. Data from Tracxn indicates that funding dropped nearly 80% in 2023, from $554.7 million in 2022 to $113.4 million. Despite this, India is home to over 100 GenAI startups and more than 750 AI startups in total.
South Korean AI startups collectively raised 326.8 billion won ($240 million) in the first quarter of 2024, a significant increase from 89.8 billion won in the previous year. No South Korean AI startup has yet attained unicorn status, while India’s Krutrim achieved this milestone in early 2024.
Upstage, a standout South Korean AI startup, secured $72 million in early 2024 for its Document AI solution and Solar LLM API, attracting over 400 customers. Founded in 2020, Upstage specializes in converting Korean documents into machine-readable data and has developed its own language model, Solar, due to the lack of high-quality Korean data. In 2023, Upstage’s LLM topped the global evaluation leaderboard, surpassing models from Meta, Microsoft, and other tech giants.
In India, there is a vibrant community of engineers and entrepreneurs engaging with AI technologies. Despite patenting around 5,400 AI-related innovations between 2010 and 2020, India faces a significant shortfall of skilled AI researchers, estimated at 213,000.
Nonetheless, Indian software developers made significant contributions to AI projects on GitHub, accounting for 24.19% of contributions in 2022, surpassing contributions from the EU, UK, US, and China.
