K Cube Ventures, in which South Korean tech firm Kakao (formerly Daum Kakao) owns a 10 percent stake, is placing bets on Internet of Things (IoT) and online-to-offline services. One of them is the reason why we use the Robopocalypse tag here: It’s investing 300M won (about US$250k) in UVify, a startup building artificial intelligence-enabled drones.
UVify is staffed by a team of mechanical and aerospace engineers from Seoul National University, according to the company, and its goal is to build drones “that can automatically operate without totally relying on humans,” according to BusinessKorea.
“Uvify has technological competitiveness in both hardware and software as it has been devoted to developing autonomous aircraft and robots in the past years,” — Chung Shina, partner, K Cube Ventures
UVify has also raised another 600M won from Korean state-run investment agencies.
Kakao has built a dominant mobile messaging service in Korea, KakaoTalk, but has struggled to gain any traction for that product outside Asia. The company recently bought Path, a US-based messaging service that has been lauded for a great user interface and approach to messaging, but also failed to make a dent in the North American market as Snapchat, Facebook Messenger, and others have established themselves. It’s not surprising to see diversification on Kakao’s part, and AI plus drones are smart bets. Or will end up enabling our doom. Or both.