□ DGIST (President Kunwoo Lee) announced that DGIST Holdings (Co-CEOs JaeHyung Koo and Moon Jong Choi) had successfully held the inaugural general meeting to establish its first investment fund of approximately KRW 2 billion since its incorporation and would begin full-scale investment to foster early-stage deep-tech companies and campus startups. This fund, established amid a subdued domestic venture investment market, is expected to bring DGIST's world-class research achievements to the market and serve as a strong pillar of support for regional startups facing a funding drought.
□ Starting with the establishment of this fund, DGIST Holdings will focus its investments on faculty- and researcher-led startups, as well as promising early-stage deep-tech companies, in future national strategic technology fields, such as artificial intelligence, robotics, advanced semiconductors, and biotechnology and healthcare. In particular, instead of simply providing funding, it plans to launch a full-scale “growth acceleration network” in collaboration with major domestic venture capital firms and startup centers at science and technology institutes, so that early-stage investments can smoothly lead to follow-on investments (Series A and B).
□ In addition, DGIST Holdings will establish a differentiated support system to assist researchers facing challenges in business management despite their possession of outstanding technologies. It will directly match them with external professional CEOs and support “company building,” planning the entire process from company establishment to growth. It also plans to maximize the practical effects of its investments by linking these efforts with its in-house “Deep-Tech Venture Studio” program.
□ After establishing an initial investment portfolio through this first fund, DGIST Holdings plans to gradually expand the size of its funds by actively utilizing government policy funding programs, including the Fund of Funds. Furthermore, based on the fund established this year, it will link its investments with the Tech Incubator Program for Startups (TIPS), a private investment-led technology startup support program, and provide full support to help the companies that it has invested in be selected as TIPS startup teams.
□ “As Vice President for Research & University-Industry Collaboration at DGIST, I was deeply concerned to see outstanding technologies developed on campus fail to cross the commercialization threshold due to a lack of funding,” said JaeHyung Koo, Co-CEO of DGIST Holdings. “Through the establishment of this fund, the technology transfer and commercialization support functions of the Institute of Innovation and Entrepreneurship and the investment function of DGIST Holdings will be organically integrated, enabling outstanding research achievements developed on campus to be translated into startups and investment more quickly and systematically.”
□ “The core role of a technology holding company is to ensure that outstanding deep-tech assets developed in university laboratories do not remain in the lab but bear fruit in industry,” said Moon Jong Choi, Co-CEO of DGIST Holdings. “Using this first fund as a catalyst, we will firmly establish a virtuous cycle of industry-academia collaboration in which DGIST’s research achievements contribute to the Daegu–Gyeongbuk regional economy as a new growth engine.”
□ Meanwhile, building on the active investment and startup ecosystem development by DGIST Holdings, DGIST plans to further invigorate laboratory-based entrepreneurship on campus. Through these efforts, DGIST aims to strengthen the nation’s competitiveness in core technologies and grow into a world-class hub for interdisciplinary research and entrepreneurship that contributes to revitalizing the regional economy and creating high-quality jobs through the dissemination and diffusion of outstanding technologies.
