MakinaRocks raises 12 billion won in Series A funding

MakinaRocks, a startup specializing in enterprise AI solutions, announced on the 22nd that it had raised KRW 12 billion in a Series A round, following its seed funding in May 2018.

With offices in Seoul and Silicon Valley, MakinaRocks provides industrial AI solutions that improve production efficiency through deep learning- and reinforcement learning-based anomaly detection and intelligent control technologies.

The Series A round is notable for the diverse participation of strategic investors (SIs), including LG Technology Ventures, Hyundai Motor Company, and Applied Ventures, the corporate venture capital arm of Applied Materials, alongside financial investors (FIs) such as the Korea Development Bank, Daesung Private Equity, Shinhan Investment Corp., and HB Investment. Even at the seed stage in 2018, the company secured joint investment from major Korean companies, including SK Telecom, Hyundai Motor Company, and NAVER D2 Startup Factory—a rare achievement for a startup.

It is highly unusual for several of Korea’s leading conglomerates to participate in a Series A round at the same time. As interest in AI-driven innovation grows across industries, investors were drawn to MakinaRocks’ potential for global growth, implementation experience, and technical capabilities as a leading manufacturing AI startup.

MakinaRocks’ solutions address a range of manufacturing challenges and are especially well suited to industries with complex processes, including automotive, semiconductors, batteries, and pharmaceuticals. The company is working with key companies in its target markets, including strategic investors, to deploy its solutions on production lines. These deployments have improved equipment uptime and product quality by predicting equipment failures and quality issues, and increased production efficiency through intelligent control.

Building on this funding, MakinaRocks plans to quickly add major companies in Korea and overseas to its customer base. To support global expansion, the company is broadening its business and product portfolio and developing a range of business models, including cloud-based SaaS solutions that extend its existing on-premise offerings. It also plans to actively recruit top talent across data analytics, AI development, business planning, and product development to fuel its growth.

Earlier this year, MakinaRocks demonstrated its technical capabilities when a paper on Ra (Reconstruction along Projection Pathway)-based anomaly detection was accepted at ICLR 2020, one of the most prestigious conferences in artificial intelligence.

MakinaRocks: http://makinarocks.ai/