KT invests in local AI startups to expand ecosystem

KT CEO Kim Young-shub, left, talks with Qanda CEO Lee Yong-jae, right, during the M360 APAC conference at the Westin Josun Seoul hotel, Thursday. KT said on Sunday that it signed strategic partnerships with domestic AI startups Upstage and Qanda with equity investments of 20 billion won ($15 million). Courtesy of KT

By Baek Byung-yeul

KT is investing in two Korean AI startups as part of its plan to expand the AI business-related ecosystem, the telecommunications company said Sunday.

The company said it made equity investments totaling 20 billion won ($15 million) in Upstage and Qanda and entered into strategic partnerships with them.

Upstage is known for its generative AI capability as its AI model took first place on Hugging Face's Open LLM Leaderboard competition with the highest score of 72.3, edging out OpenAI's ChatGPT last month.

Qanda is an education-specialized startup as it has ranked as the No.1 education application category in 20 countries.

KT's move is interpreted as the company taking aim at expanding its ecosystem by increasing strategic investments at a time when the company will soon launch its hyperscale AI platform Mi:dm. With this goal, the company introduced the two companies as its partners at the Mobile 360 (M360) APAC conference in Seoul last week and said it would expand the cooperation.

Through the partnership with Upstage, KT will target the business-to-business (B2B) AI market such as developing private large language model (LLM) solutions for enterprises.

With Qanda, KT will collaborate on the development of business-to-consumer (B2C) services such as the development of LLMs AI-specialized for education platforms.

KT said the collaborations will further strengthen its capability as an AI full-stack service provider. AI full-stack refers to products and services that supervise the entire process from infrastructure such as semiconductors and cloud, which are foundational to AI, to AI application services provided to customers, according to KT.

“The companies we are collaborating with are specialized in language models and application services,” a company spokesperson said. “As the demand for AI increases, the needs of our customers will diversify, so we plan to expand our AI full-stack partners.”

In July, KT announced that it would invest 15 billion won in local AI company Moreh, a startup specializing in AI infrastructure software, providing an AI infrastructure software stack and AI cluster and cloud services.