Interior ministry names 10 finalists as startup contest draws record 7,440 teams

The interior ministry said Tuesday it has selected 10 teams to advance to the final round of its government-wide startup competition using public data and artificial intelligence, after a record 7,440 teams entered this year's event.

That is a 93 percent jump from the 3,856 teams in the 13th edition last year, and it left the finalists facing odds of roughly 744 to one. The ministry attributed the surge to the growing value of public data combined with advances in generative AI and conversational coding tools, which it said now let anyone with an idea build a working prototype quickly.

The 111 teams recommended by 42 central and local government bodies — 63 in idea planning, 48 in product and service development — presented in person and demonstrated their products at the Seoul Startup Hub from Sept. 30 to Oct. 2. Judges evaluated their use of public data, their AI technology and services, and their originality.

Multimodal applications stood out, with more teams combining computer vision that analyzes satellite imagery and drawings with generative AI, and many using optical character recognition and object recognition to read images and text together. Services built around personalized recommendation algorithms and AI-assisted summarization and analysis of administrative documents also drew attention.

The finalists will compete for the overall title at KINTEX in Goyang, Gyeonggi Province, in November, with the ministry planning tailored training on refining business plans, attracting investment, advancing their use of AI and sharpening their pitches. Prizes include 10 citations, among them two presidential awards and two prime ministerial awards, with total prize money of 100 million won ($73,551).

"This competition not only set a record for participation, but showed that advanced technologies such as generative AI and multimodal systems are combining with public data to evolve into innovative services that people can feel," Vice Interior Minister Kim Min-jae said. "The Ministry of the Interior and Safety will actively support the excellent results discovered here so they lead to startups and stronger national competitiveness."

The competition has run annually since 2013 to turn private-sector ideas combining public data with AI into real businesses. Over the past 13 years, 22,364 teams have taken part, and 82 of the 147 past winning teams, or 55.8 percent, went on to found companies. Thirty-four teams, including Wand, which won an excellence award at the 13th competition for an AI patent-writing tool, have raised a combined 142 billion won ($104 million) in investment, while 48 teams including Seomrution have filed or registered 344 patents.