K Cube Ventures and Kakao Brain have invested an undisclosed amount in AI-focused startup Skelter Labs. It’s the first investment in a startup for Kakao Brain, Kakao’s subsidiary which focuses on AI research.
Skelter Labs was founded by CEO Ted Cho, who was previously Engineering Site Director for Korea at Google and completed a PhD in Computer Science at KAIST. The startup has been developing machine learning and deep learning technology — implementing it in various projects and services.
The main goal of Skelter Labs is to combine data collected from consumers and offer personalized solutions across a wide range of areas including commerce, content, communities and messengers. In order to gather this data, it’s developing relevant apps and forming strategic partnerships with firms in various sectors. The company will then use this data to update and improve apps and services as it’s collected.
The first project from Skelter Labs is an iOS app called Thumbday — a personal logging platform which automatically captures your daily activities. In the second half of the year, the app plans to offer personalized recommendations based on individual user data to recommend things to do and places to visit.
In addition to this, Skelter Labs is preparing several other projects to be released in the near future, including a customized service for finding and booking cheap flights, as well as a POS (point of sale) platform which uses big data. Like most AI firms, the team is also focused on developing intelligent chat bots, and is currently creating an application which uses machine learning and natural language processing (NLP).
“We look forward to creating synergy with Kakao which is actively engaged in the development of a wide range of businesses including search, O2O, and interactive services,” says Cho. “At the same time, we will continue to push forward with our business model which is based around our competitive technology to be at the forefront of AI the world.”
Beyond these current projects, Skelter Labs intends to build a framework for AI conversation-style bots in numerous languages by developing a dialog management system that detects context and intent of the speaker. It also plans to integrate its technology which recognizes voice and video with various IoT devices.
