From left, Park Tae-joon, managing director of LG Group’s venture capital investment subsidy LG Technology Ventures; Imran Chaudhri, founder of Humane; Neerav Kingsland, head of strategic partnerships at Anthropic; and Michael Stewart, a partner at Microsoft's venture fund M12, attend the LG Open Innovation Summit in Silicon Valley, California, June 26. Courtesy of LG Corp.
LG Group increased the size of its corporate venture capital fund to 1 trillion won ($771.3 million) from 600 billion won as part of efforts to strengthen investments in technology companies that are leading future industries such as AI, biotech, batteries and mobility, according to LG, Sunday.
LG Technology Ventures, a Silicon Valley-based venture capital investment unit of the group, is a company established in 2018 to discover global startups with innovative technologies that can create synergy with its affiliates.
Seven affiliates, including LG Electronics, LG Display, LG Innotek, LG Chem, LG Energy Solution, LG Uplus and LG CNS, invested in LG Technology Venture, thereby creating the 600 billion won fund.
As 70 percent of the entire fund has been used, the group said its four affiliates – LG Energy Solution, LG Chem, LG Uplus and LG CNS – decided to invest more in the corporate venture, resulting in an operation fund totaling over 1 trillion won.
“Based on the decision, LG Technology Ventures is able to continue to invest in new startups,” LG said.
Increasing its efforts in discovering new technologies is in line with the group’s Chairman Koo Kwang-mo’s vision, which focuses on finding new growth engines in emerging business sectors.
In 2019, the year after his inauguration, the chairman visited LG Technology Ventures and urged the organization to discover promising global startups and prepare for the future.
Over the past five years, LG has invested over 400 billion won in 64 companies, including startups and venture capital funds, through LG Technology Ventures. Their investment in AI, biotech, batteries and mobility accounts for half of the cumulative investment amount.
Recently, venture capital increased its investment in AI by investing in Allganize, a company that develops all-in-one solutions based on a large language model, and Anthropic, an AI startup founded by researchers from OpenAI. Allganize provides AI solutions to improve work productivity to more than 200 companies and public institutions in three countries — Korea, the U.S. and Japan.
LG Technology Ventures is also pouring funds into the U.S. startup Inworld AI. The company develops platforms for creating virtual characters used in the metaverse, virtual reality, augmented reality and games. Utilizing the company’s AI technology, LG Uplus released a global version of the children's metaverse service in the first half of this year.
"We plan to actively discover startups that can collaborate to enhance future capabilities of LG affiliates,” Kim Dong-su, CEO of LG Technology Ventures, said.
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