The Ventures makes seed investment in KAIST professors' AI inference start-up AnyBridge
In short
Venture capital firm The Ventures (더벤처스) said on 22 October that it has completed a seed investment in AnyBridge, an AI infrastructure software start-up founded by two KAIST professors. AnyBridge was also selected for the TIPS programme of the Ministry of SMEs and Startups, with up to 800 million won in R&D funding over two years. The company aims to cut AI inference costs by 40 to 70 percent compared with GPU-only infrastructure.
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The venture capital firm The Ventures (더벤처스) said on 22 October that it had completed a seed investment in AnyBridge, an AI infrastructure software start-up. Dong-A Ilbo reported that the investment amount was not disclosed. AnyBridge was selected for the TIPS programme of the Ministry of SMEs and Startups on The Ventures' recommendation and signed the agreement on 21 October. Through TIPS it can receive up to 800 million won in R&D funding over the next two years. [ 1 , 2 , 3 ]
AnyBridge was co-founded by Park Jong-se (박종세) and Kwon Young-jin (권영진), professors in the KAIST computer science department. It is developing a multi-accelerator runtime and an enterprise AI agent platform. The software is meant to use GPUs, NPUs and PIM chips together and to assign the suitable chip to each inference task according to response speed, cost and model size. The company aims to cut inference costs by 40 to 70 percent compared with GPU-only infrastructure. [ 1 , 2 , 3 ]
Dong-A Ilbo and ZDNet Korea said the system is designed to be compatible with the APIs of OpenAI, Google Gemini and Anthropic Claude. Dong-A Ilbo said this is meant to let companies adopt it without greatly changing their existing development methods. ZDNet Korea said the company will pursue the market with licence, managed and token-factory models. [ 2 , 3 ]
Asia Economy and Dong-A Ilbo said the technical base is LLMServingSim, an open-source simulator released by Park's research team, which won a best paper award at the 2024 IISWC conference. Both said AnyBridge won the grand prize in the Kakao AI nurturing project, and that in September it signed an agreement with two domestic AI chip companies, Puriosa AI (퓨리오사AI) and Haipeoeksel (하이퍼엑셀), on jointly developing an NPU-based enterprise AI agent platform. Dong-A Ilbo and ZDNet Korea said Stanford professor Kunle Olukotun, a co-founder of Sambanova (삼바노바), is an adviser. [ 1 , 2 , 3 ]
Asia Economy and ZDNet Korea said the funds will go to product development and customer trials. The company plans pilots with two to three customers this year and a proof of concept with Kakao Cloud, then an official product launch in 2027. [ 1 , 2 ]
Kim Cheol-woo (김철우), head of The Ventures, said more companies are using generative AI in real services and that operating costs weigh as heavily as model performance. He said he expects AnyBridge to greatly lower companies' AI adoption costs. Park said software that lets companies use various AI chips together is still at an early stage and that the company aims to create a unified operating standard starting with the 2027 launch. [ 2 , 3 ]
Dong-A Ilbo noted that whether the targeted cost saving can be achieved in real corporate settings has to be confirmed through later trials, because the effect may vary with chip configuration, AI model type and usage. [ 3 ]
Why it matters
The coverage presents the deal as support for software that lets companies run large language models on several kinds of AI chips rather than GPUs alone. Dong-A Ilbo noted that the stated cost-saving target still has to be shown in real corporate settings.
Key facts
- The Ventures said on 22 October that it completed a seed investment in AnyBridge, an AI infrastructure software start-up. [ 1 , 2 , 3 ]
- AnyBridge was selected for the Ministry of SMEs and Startups' TIPS programme on The Ventures' recommendation and signed the agreement on 21 October. [ 1 , 2 , 3 ]
- Under TIPS, AnyBridge can receive up to 800 million won in R&D funding over the next two years. [ 1 , 2 , 3 ]
- AnyBridge was co-founded by KAIST computer science professors Park Jong-se (박종세) and Kwon Young-jin (권영진). [ 1 , 2 , 3 ]
- AnyBridge is developing a multi-accelerator runtime that allocates GPUs, NPUs and PIM chips automatically, and aims to cut inference costs by 40 to 70 percent against GPU-only infrastructure. [ 1 , 2 , 3 ]
- The company plans to launch its official product in 2027. [ 1 , 2 , 3 ]
- Dong-A Ilbo reported that the investment amount was not disclosed. [ 3 ]
Confirmed by several sources
- The Ventures completed a seed investment in AnyBridge, announced on 22 October. [ 1 , 2 , 3 ]
- AnyBridge was selected for TIPS on The Ventures' recommendation, signed the agreement on 21 October, and can receive up to 800 million won in R&D funding over two years. [ 1 , 2 , 3 ]
- AnyBridge aims to lower inference costs by 40 to 70 percent compared with GPU-only infrastructure. [ 1 , 2 , 3 ]
- AnyBridge's technical base is the open-source LLM serving simulator LLMServingSim from Park Jong-se's research team, which won a best paper award at IISWC in 2024. [ 1 , 3 ]
- AnyBridge won the grand prize in the Kakao AI nurturing project and in September signed an agreement with two domestic AI chip companies on jointly developing an NPU-based enterprise AI agent platform. [ 1 , 3 ]
- Stanford professor Kunle Olukotun, a co-founder of Sambanova (삼바노바), is advising AnyBridge. [ 2 , 3 ]
Still unclear
- Whether the targeted 40 to 70 percent cost saving can be achieved in real corporate environments. Dong-A Ilbo said this must be confirmed through later trials and that savings may vary with chip configuration, AI model type and usage.
- The size of the seed investment. Dong-A Ilbo said the amount was not disclosed; the other documents do not give it.
- AnyBridge's patents, papers and engineering team. Only ZDNet Korea said the company holds more than 110 top-tier conference papers and 26 patents and that five KAIST-trained engineers lead development.