MORAI, under CEOs Jiwon Jeong, Jun Hong, and Soogwan Lee, attended the Korea-US Startup Summit, held at Pier 17, New York, USA from Tuesday, September 20th to Wednesday the 21st. Here they met with Leo Thevenet, CEO of Lecafedugeek, for an interview about the company.
MORAI will show thousands of scenarios simultaneously – Ensuring a maximum of safety
MORAI, a tech company established in 2018, develops simulation platforms used for testing the capabilities and safety of autonomous vehicles. It is also the only Korean company to develop a complete autonomous driving simulation that has a core engine included.
MORAI’s HD map data creates an identical replica of complex roads as large as Las Vegas with 95% automation, using their automatic construction technology. This is essential, as a spokesman explained, since, “All automated systems must go through a verification process, and it is even more important to do so when it is related to safety. As autonomous driving systems in particular are directly linked with the safety of people, it needs to go through strict verification to guarantee the safety of both the driver and pedestrians.”
The goal of MORAI is to help test these vehicles as closely and realistically (up to 10 cm) as possible, to prevent accidents. Clients can operate multiple systems at once, with several tests running at the same time, increasing efficiency and lowering costs comparatively. As scenario tests can be difficult to perform on real streets, MORAI SIM can provide these environments, and let the tests run thousands of times, if desired.
The recently developed “MORAI SIM CLOUD” introduced the Software as a Service (SaaS) method to established products, thus enabling one PC to perform the task of thousands, in lieu of needing a second program.
It has advanced vehicle modeling technology that imitates the exact proportions of many vehicles, including sensors, which can be placed anywhere in the simulation.
MORAI has successful relations with both domestic and overseas companies. Following seed and series A round investments between 2018 and 2021 from Naver, Hyundai Motors, Kakao Ventures, and AtinumInvestment, MORAI secured a series B investment totaling 30 billion KRW in February 2022.
2021 sales reached 2 billion KRW, the compound annual growth rate rising to 226% since 2018.
With the domestic market well explored, MORAI is now looking to expand overseas through collaborations with companies such as NVIDIA, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Velodyne Lidar, Ansys, and dSPACE. According to a company spokesman, the range of clients is to be expanded to the North American market, with a local corporation in San Francisco.
Similar plans are in action in Germany and Singapore as well: “We are creating various synergistic effects through continuous collaboration with companies and research & educational institutions overseas. We will advance MORAI’s technology to become the standard for the world market by connecting with authoritative academic symposiums and conferences.”
