House byline
Startups correspondent
Taeyoung Baek is a house byline for InfoHandle’s Startups desk.
Toss opened merchant APIs for overseas Korean grocery pop-ups ahead of holiday return season, letting short-term stores accept Toss Pay and loyalty stamps without integrating full domestic POS stacks.
Dunamu’s Luniverse unit tokenized verified carbon credits from a Jeju resort energy retrofit, selling fractional offsets to Korean corporates that need audited retirement trails before year-end emissions reporting.
Riiid is selling adaptive CSAT drill APIs to two national hagwon chains ahead of the fall mock-exam season, piping its knowledge-tracing models into existing class portals without replacing printed mock booklets.
Toss Payments is testing merchant cash advances for a closed group of Coupang marketplace sellers, routing repayments through settlement rails it already operates after Coupang Financial paused its in-house seller loan product.
TwoPlan began mapping real-time payroll float for Seoul construction SMEs, linking site attendance tablets to subcontractor payout calendars so general contractors see which crews risk missing Friday wage transfers.
Dunamu Labs shipped sandbox modules that let partner banks test won on-ramps into tokenized dollar liabilities, wiring travel-rule hooks and FSC reporting schemas before retail stablecoin ads go live.
RecycleLoop won a Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy grant to sort black powder from spent EV batteries at a Gwangju pilot line, pairing X-ray feedstocks with hydrometallurgy partners who need cleaner nickel and lithium than bulk shredder output.
Vroong closed a growth round aimed at refrigerated prescription lockers tucked in Gangnam back alleys, extending its DoctorNow medicine runs with pickup points that keep insulin cold when riders cannot reach office towers before security curfews.
Jeonbuk agritech startup MistBerry Co. filed a pre-Series A to deploy greenhouse mist and humidity sensors that log export-grade strawberry cold-chain data for Japanese buyers ahead of Chuseok air cargo peaks.
A Daegu insurtech startup is scoring policyholder flood photos for monsoon basement claims so adjusters can triage payouts before inspectors reach saturated alleyways, using on-device hashes and cloud models tuned on last season’s Nakdong basin losses.