Last week, we attended as judge, the ITS 2022 K-Innovative Showcase Awards show which purpose is to award the best Korean SME out of 10 pre-selected competitors. Innovation was not the whole focus though. We needed to assess the quality and performance of the product compared to competitors’ products, the cost competitiveness, the potential of sustainable growth and the potential impact on the industry at an international level. And in the end, we saw a lot of potential there.
So, without further ado, let us present to you the 10 competitors.
Kanavi Mobility
If you haven’t been living on another planet during the last few years, you probably noticed all the fuss around autonomous cars and unmanned robots. Kanavi Mobility is solving an important problem for these kinds of products which is getting more information on surrounding objects and location.
To do so, they are developing a new kind of LIDAR sensor. LIDAR stands for Light Detection and Ranging. And the goal of this sensor is measuring the exact distance of an object on the earth’s surface.
Example of LIDAR sensors output
Ref: https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/18/8/2571
Now, what is differentiating them from the domestic competitors is that they are the first to succeed in commercialization of LiDAR sensors with domestic technology. However, there is still a major problem which that the company is highly reliant on imports.
Overall, we believe that the product is innovative enough and relatively low cost so that the company can be a potential pillar of the domestic but also neighboring markets.
Everchemtech
This one is an interesting one for people/companies interested in reducing their environmental impact. Everchemtech is developing eco-friendly materials that provides an oxygen and moisture barrier for food packaging. Not only they reduce the number of products that are hardly recycled like the petroleum-based plastics, but the whey protein (leftover by-product from cheese) that they are using for their product is bio-degradable and low-cost.
Everchemtech products
We believe the company has an important role to play in the fight against plastic pollution but by providing low-cost and recyclable/biodegradable products it can lower the dependency that a lot of countries/companies have on foreign companies to recycle their waste. If you are interested in this kind of innovation, definitely check them out!
IntelliVIX
You waited for it, and you finally have an AI company. More precisely IntelliVIX is a Vision AI company. They focus on video analysis for CCTV cameras.
What’s important for them is data privacy and safety. With their on-device analytics they can improve the data privacy part. This is because the cameras don’t need to communicate with external devices and thus this limits the risk of attacks. For the safety part, they are talking about safety for people in the society. With their cameras and their deep learning algorithms, they can detect violent actions, illegal behaviors but also accidents (cars, construction sites, …).
In our opinion, this is a crowded market. However, what’s important here is the focus on on-device analysis. We believe this is where the safety and public monitoring should move toward. This would limit potential attacks and improve data privacy for everyone.
Jeejun Systems
Jeejun systems product
Underground Parking lots are often providing us with a painful experience. It is hard to find a spot, you might have problems with your ticket and for the least lucky of us, you might have been robbed or even worst. JeeJun Systems is trying to solve all of that by providing a whole system for underground parkings.
The system itself contains products like:
- A pass which lets you automatically open the front door of the parking and the internal elevator.
- A communication mechanism between the control room and the parking users in case of emergency.
- An app for displaying parking capacity and help you find an optimal parking spot.
- And few other smaller devices to optimize the whole business operation.
This seems to be a more holistic view of parking management. For what we have seen up until now, parkings are using different products for different parts of their operation. Jeejun Systems, might make users’ and parking managers’ life easier with such an often overlooked but important product.
Secuworks
Secuworks ‘Smart Sound Field Security’
Another startup in the field of security but this time this is not related to CCTV cameras. Secuworks is providing a product that create sound fields to detect intrusion, temperature change, … The product does all this detection by simply analyzing the changes in sound when something happens. This makes the detection faster and as opposed to cameras this kind of product has no blind spot.
This is a highly innovative product that we never saw anywhere else. The blind spot elimination is no small feat, and we believe that this kind of sensor could be developed in a range of product that are protecting electric power facilities, electric vehicle charging stations and factories against fire and other kind of incidents.
NES&TEC
NES&TEC Drone
Another security startup, however, this time they are focusing on national security and more precisely on the creation of drones for military, firefighting, or disaster cases. As this company is focusing on national security, its products need to be secure. Here, the main issue with drone is something called “frequency jamming” which alters the drone navigation system and other vital features.
By developing a proprietary control system, NES&TEC makes the frequency jamming impossible and thus makes their drone suitable for highly critical operations. Furthermore, due to some recent regulations in Korea, DJI, the leader in the industry, got his sales suspended. Thus NES&TEC is taking advantage of the situation to establish its presence in the national market.
We believe that the market is crowded in the drone industry. Drone companies like DJI and Parrot have huge market share. However, innovative companies like NES&TEC could provide drone that are more secure, for special kind of operations.
JPES
JPES’ Strapping Head
JPES is one of these companies that seems to be working on engineering things that most people don’t understand. However, it doesn’t mean the need for, and importance of such product doesn’t exist.
They are developing a new strapping technology which is intended to make the process of packaging more efficient. Currently, most of the companies use something called a “pneumatic strapping head”, but this company is developing a lighter and smaller head which will help the companies improve their productivity in the industry.
While we are not expert on the domain, it seems the idea is interesting, and the product is needed. We are not sure how the situation will evolve for this company, but we are going to make sure to understand more about it and follow its progress.
Ison
Ison’s Self-Charging Drone Station
If you have been playing with drone you know that the battery is still one of the biggest inconveniences. Ison’s develops a self-charging drone station to fight against this problem.
What’s interesting with the elevated approach is that these stations can at the same time be used for CCTV camera, charging drones and as 5G relay. On top of that the company is making sure that different drone models can be charged using their station.
We can see the potential of this. Imagine having a factory or warehouse where unmanned drones are transporting goods. At some point they will need to charge, and they could do so automatically by going back to their station, charge up and go back to work. Keep an eye on this.
SHENB
The beauty industry has its own set of challenges to overcome and the biggest one is for sure health safety. SHENB is focusing on solving the problem in the domain of skin rejuvenation.
Virtue RF delivers the Radio Frequency to the skin, thereby boosting skin rejuvenation. And while this is not the first product of its category, the company added 4 important features on top of the current technology:
- ACS (Advanced Cooling System) which reduces the pain of such treatment by cooling the skin down.
- IPRS (Integrated Pulsed Radiofrequency System) which breaks the radio frequency 10 sub-pulses to reduce skin damage.
- ECS (Integrated Energy Control System) which allows for different wavelength.
- MDCS (Minimum Depth Control System) which can administer the energy deeper and make it available for face and other areas.
We already knew that Korea is strong in the beauty industry. What we didn’t know however, is that there is ton of tech innovation in this industry. SHENB seems to be focusing a lot of safety of their products and we think that this is definitely something worth investigating.
website
P&S Technology
The reason most of us don’t see that many defects in products like glass bottles, cans and other food or beverage containers is that there are companies, like P&S, developing machines to eject the inadequate ones.
What makes their machine innovative is that they have one feature that the others don’t have yet. This feature is called “Mirror Tracking System” and it permits the machine to not have any blind spot. They can thus scan circular objects without problem.
PS-21GP
Once again, we are not experts here but since we can see circular objects all around us, we believe that such technology has use cases and we think that P&S could solve such problem on the domestic but also on the international market.
Read our last year article from ITS 2021 – Our top 3 K-Innovative Startups !
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