B2B AI Startup Dalpha Raises 12 Billion Won in Pre-A Funding Just One Year After Founding

Despite the investment drought, Dalpha secured a large-scale 12 billion won investment just 10 months after its seed round.

Dalpha (CEO Kim Do-gyun), an AI startup pursuing AX (AI Experience) innovation, announced on the 24th that it had raised 12 billion won in Pre-A funding just one year after its founding.

This round saw lead investor Mirae Asset Venture Investment join, along with new investors Intervest, DSC Investment, IMM Investment, and Partners Investment. In addition, existing investors Primer Sazze Partners and Springcamp also made follow-on investments. With this, Dalpha has now raised a cumulative 13.3 billion won, combining its 1.3 billion won seed round with the 12 billion won Pre-A round.

As AI technology rapidly advances, market interest in AI is extremely high. However, companies themselves are unable to make practical use of AI.

Focusing on this problem, Dalpha has been developing and supplying custom AI solutions to a wide range of companies, with the goal of 'helping all companies maximize revenue and minimize costs through AI.' Not limited to any specific industry, it has developed over 100 in-house AI solutions that companies across diverse industries—including e-commerce, fashion & beauty, marketing, and content—can use. To solve each company's highly specific and varied pain points with AI, Dalpha contributes to maximizing revenue and minimizing costs through 'AI customization.'

Clients that have actually adopted Dalpha's AI are reaping clear benefits in both productivity improvement and revenue growth. They are seeing direct and indirect revenue gains such as a 30% increase in purchase conversion rate, while also effectively cutting costs through AI—reducing manual work time by more than 70% compared to before and halving outsourcing costs.

Founded in January last year, Dalpha has collaborated with clients on a variety of AI projects. It develops and provides AI solutions that improve customer experience and streamline repetitive tasks—not only for large corporations such as KT Commerce, LG Uplus, Lotte Daehong Communications, and CJ OliveNetworks, but also for leading startups like MyRealTrip, Enlighten (operator of Wippy), and Makeus (operator of Dingo).

Alongside this investment, Dalpha plans to launch a new SaaS (Software as a Service) that makes it even easier to adopt custom AI. Through this SaaS, it aims to lower companies' AI adoption hurdles by providing a one-stop offering—from connecting a company's data sources to preprocessing, verifying results through AI training and inference, and feedback and follow-up management. It also plans to develop internal software that automates AI customization to fit each company through an AI block-assembly approach, enabling faster and more precise creation of an even wider range of custom AI.

In addition, Dalpha plans to boost its AI technology capabilities by focusing on recruiting talent across many fields, and to accelerate its preparations for entering overseas markets.

Dalpha CEO Kim Do-gyun said, "Ever since the like-minded Seoul National University founders came together to establish the company, we have been able to grow at an astonishing pace within just one year alongside exceptional talent," adding, "Following this funding, we will aggressively recruit talent to strengthen our technology across the entire scope of B2B AI business, and accelerate the expansion of our business areas by unveiling a variety of products."

Jo Jin-hwan, Director, and Seo Jae-min, Team Leader at Mirae Asset Venture Investment, which led this round, said, "Since the emergence of ChatGPT, companies' AI transformation has been spreading rapidly, but many companies need custom AI solutions and professional support in the process of integrating AI into their existing business models and processes," and added, "Dalpha is quickly meeting these companies' needs and drawing market attention, and we decided to invest because it has very high growth potential in terms of both technology and execution."

Meanwhile, company representatives interested in adopting AI can browse Dalpha's existing AI solutions and try out demos through Dalpha's 'AI Store.' Even if the AI solution they want to adopt is not available in the AI Store, they can adopt their own custom AI through a tailored consultation.