In Process of Attracting Additional Investment

42Maru CEO  D.K Donghwan Kim (right) poses with Kim Geon-su from Korea Development Bank after signing an investment agreement.  

42Maru, an AI startup specializing in question answering (QA) platform, announced on Aug. 5 that it has attracted 2 billion won investment from Korea Development Bank (KDB).

The company will sell 2 billion won worth of convertible bond to KDB. These bonds can be converted into shares with the conversion value to be determined at the time of attracting subsequent investment. KDB prepared this startup promotion program to support corporate growth and crisis recovery through instant financial support in the COVID-19 pandemic situation.

42Maru is in the process of attracting additional investment to strengthen its competitiveness in the global SaaS enterprise market.

42Maru is a group of search experts led by Kim Dong-hwan, who has search business experience with SK Group. Based on commercial service know-how in building large-scale systems and operatting various content in search engine, 42Maru is an AI startup that develops SaaS-based deep semantic QA platform specialized in language processing and text analytics by applying the latest deep learning artificial intelligence technology.

42Maru attracted seed investment from Spring Camp, a Naver-affiliated venture capital, in September 2017, and was the first Korean AI startup to be selected for the Techstars London program, Europe’s largest accelerator. It attracted investment as well.

In particular, it was co-ranked No. 1 with Google AI team at SQuAD 2.0, a global machine reading comprehension competition, and was globally recognized for its advanced technology.

42Maru CEO Kim said, "I am very pleased to attract investment from KDB, a public bank, which recognized our unique technology and potential growth as global unicorn.” He also said, “With this investment, we plan to continue to advance into the global enterprise SaaS market, and we are in close discussion with various local and foreign investors and institutions regarding the attraction of additional investments."

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