COOLJAMM Company Becomes First Korean Startup to Participate in Skydeck Demo Day

COOLJAMM Inc., a Korean startup that developed the humming-based song composition application "HumOn," participated in the demo day event hosted on Nov. 7 by the California-based startup accelerator and incubator SkyDeck.

COOLJAMM Inc., a member company of the K-ICT Born2Global Centre, was the first and only Korean company to participate in SkyDeck Demo Day.

SkyDeck Demo Day is a biannual event hosted by UC Berkeley that attracts the participation of startups currently taking part in SkyDeck's accelerator program that wish to receive investments. In May, COOLJAMM became the first Korean company to be selected for a cohort team.

This year's SkyDeck Demo Day was attended by approximately 20 SkyDeck cohorts for 2018 and over 850 VCs from the Silicon Valley area. Number of attendees was more than double that of last year, making this year's event the largest so far in terms of participation.

Among the 20 teams, COOLJAMM was particularly popular with the audience, which was comprised of VCs and general attendees. Visitors who saw the company's pitch and demonstration at its booth expressed their desire for the application to be released as soon as possible. Many of the investors in attendance that day put their names on the beta tester waiting list.

A music startup that aims to combine music and AI, COOLJAMM is currently operating HumOn, a mobile application that composes songs based on humming, for 350,000 members.

For the past six months, the members of the COOLJAMM team have been developing "SoundsUp," a sound source service that provides background music for videos created by local YouTubers, while moving back and forth between Korea and the United States. At a reasonable price, SoundsUp enables users to find and use music for their videos without running the risk of violating copyright restrictions. To enhance the quality of its technologies and ascertain the needs of the American market, the COOLJAMM team conducted interviews with over 100 American YouTubers. With its functions of automatically matching users with music based on entered keywords and uploaded videos, and editing the sound files in terms of length and volume to match users' videos, SoundsUp is expected to significantly alleviate the various inconveniences that users have been experiencing.

David Choi, COOLJAMM Inc. CEO, said, "A lot of people identified with the pain points that our service aims to overcome and expressed their desire to try it out as a beta service. We hope to repay users for their positive feedback by creating a service that helps YouTubers find and edit the music files they want in a more convenient manner."

SoundsUp is currently being offered as a closed beta service and is scheduled for official market release in early 2019.