□ UNIVA Corp. (CEO Myungjin Nam), an artificial intelligence (AI) company founded as a startup of DGIST (President Kunwoo Lee), has been selected to lead a sub-project under the “AIxBio Innovation Research Hub Pilot Project,” which is promoted by the Ministry of Science and ICT.
□ The “AIxBio Innovation Research Hub Pilot Project” is a major national project designed to promote digital bio-transformation by strengthening AI-based drug discovery capabilities. A total of KRW 49.1 billion will be invested in the project, including government funding from the Ministry of Science and ICT and the National Research Foundation of Korea, as well as matching funds from Daegu Metropolitan City, Kyungpook National University, and other participating organizations. The consortium, led by Kyungpook National University, includes Daegu Metropolitan City, UNIVA Corp., Kyungpook National University Hospital, and the Daegu Gyeongbuk Advanced Medical Industry Promotion Foundation.
□ With this selection, UNIVA Corp. will carry out a KRW 4.6 billion national research sub-project over a 5-year period from April 2026 to December 2030. Using the latest high-performance infrastructure, including 48 NVIDIA B300 GPUs, UNIVA Corp. will accumulate drug discovery data and lead the development of a research-specialized “AI foundation model,” a general-purpose AI model pre-trained on large volumes of data for a range of purposes.
□ Selected to lead a sub-project, UNIVA Corp. is an AI deep-tech company founded in 2021 by DGIST undergraduate students. The company has data-generation technologies specialized for specific industrial domains, as well as proprietary core technologies for foundation models. The company has demonstrated its technological capabilities by generating large-scale, high-complexity datasets, including 520,000 technical and scientific documents and 600,000 mathematical and educational data entries, and making them available on platforms such as AI Hub.
□ In 2023, UNIVA Corp. ranked first on the Open Ko-LLM leaderboard with its “KOMODO,” a Korean language model, and has continued to make notable achievements, including the recent release of the “DeepSeek-Bllossom” reasoning model series in collaboration with KAIST. Additionally, UNIVA Corp. is rapidly developing into a promising AI powerhouse, having won first place and the Minister’s Award at the AI Championship hosted by the Ministry of SMEs and Startups, subsequently receiving a DNA Innovation Award from the National IT Industry Promotion Agency.
□ Going forward, UNIVA Corp. plans to use its AI foundation model to enable precise predictions of drug candidate compounds, immediately synthesize them in an automated laboratory, and connect the results in real time with activity evaluation data from Kyungpook National University, thereby establishing a “closed loop,” an automated system in which the work flow operates without interruption from data-driven prediction to experimental validation. On the basis of this initiative, UNIVA Corp. plans to securely use sensitive medical data within Daegu’s data regulation-free zone and actively target the global AI drug discovery market by realizing a zero-latency, end-to-end AI ecosystem.
□ Myungjin Nam, CEO of UNIVA Corp., has said “This project is an important opportunity to demonstrate UNIVA Corp.’s experience in building highly complex datasets and its AI model development capabilities,” adding “By combining Korea’s top-tier clinical data with powerful infrastructure, we will play a key role in helping Korea to secure leadership in the global AI drug discovery market.”
