NVIDIA announces planned investments in Korean AI startups

Background

The MSIT-NVIDIA AI Startup Partnership Forum was held at COEX, and the Ministry of Science and ICT and NVIDIA hosted it together ^[1]. Ryu Je-myung, vice minister of science and ICT, attended ^[1]. More than 20 Korean startups met NVIDIA leaders at the forum, and more than 1,000 Korea-based members are in NVIDIA Inception ^[1]. NVIDIA Inception is NVIDIA's program for startups.

What was announced

On 9 November 2026 NVIDIA announced new planned investments in Korean startups at the forum ^[1]. The company announced an investment in Point2, and said additional investments are planned in Motif Technologies, RLWRLD and Upstage ^[1].

The companies

Point2 is an AI interconnect company that builds radio frequency-based interconnects between chips and racks ^[1]. An interconnect is the link that carries data between chips and the systems they sit in.

Motif Technologies is a Seoul-based AI lab that released Motif-3, a large language model with open weights ^[1]. Large language models are AI systems trained on large amounts of text to understand and generate language. Open weights means the trained parameters of a model are published so that others can download and run it.

RLWRLD is a physical AI startup based in San Francisco, Seoul and Tokyo that builds robot foundation models ^[1]. Physical AI refers to AI that controls machines acting in the physical world, such as robots. A robot foundation model is a general-purpose model trained to control robots across many tasks.

Upstage makes Solar language models and document AI tools ^[1]. Document AI tools read and extract information from documents such as forms and reports.

Significance

The companies named cover three areas: interconnect hardware with Point2, language models with Motif Technologies and Upstage, and physical AI with RLWRLD ^[1]. The announcement tied NVIDIA's investment plans to a forum hosted with the Ministry of Science and ICT, where more than 20 startups met NVIDIA leaders ^[1].