"The AI Battle Is at the Data Layer" Kakao Ventures Bets on Algorix [fn Market Watch]

[Financial News] As competition among large language models (LLMs) has recently shifted from performance to real-world business use, venture capital firms are also turning their attention to data infrastructure. With the rise of the agentic AI era, in which AI can carry out tasks on its own, technology that connects scattered corporate data into a single system is emerging as a new investment area.
According to the venture capital industry on the 14th, Kakao Ventures made a pre-seed investment in AI data infrastructure startup Algorix. The size of the investment was not disclosed.
Industry watchers say AI competitiveness will increasingly depend not on the model itself, but on how efficiently companies can connect and use their data. In practice, corporate information is often scattered across ERP systems, groupware, document management systems and databases, making it difficult to adopt AI without connecting the data one by one.
To address this problem, Algorix is developing a multimodal data engine that manages information in various forms, including text, images, tables and relational data, within a single logical layer. The key is to let AI query, analyze and compute data in the same way without having to understand each system's structure separately.
The industry has seen major investment flow into document recognition and AI model development, but the 'middle layer' that connects the data AI needs to use has remained relatively underserved. Algorix aims to get ahead in that market.
With the new funding, the company plans to expand proof-of-concept projects for enterprise clients and upgrade its cloud-based data platform. It also plans to work with AWS through a software partnership so companies can easily deploy the service in their own cloud environments. In the early stage, it will target the enterprise market, where data security is critical, before expanding into APAC and North America.
Algorix was founded by CEO Kwon Dong-han, who experienced data integration challenges while working on enterprise AI transformation projects, and Chief Scientist Noh Soo-ho, who has research and development experience in LLM agents, machine learning and database systems.
An industry source said, "Competition over AI model performance is becoming increasingly standardized," adding, "Going forward, how well companies structure their data for AI is likely to be directly tied to productivity."
Choi Hyun-ik, senior investment director at Kakao Ventures, also said, "Algorix is solving the problem of turning unstructured knowledge inside organizations into a structured data system that AI can use," and added, "We expect it to build core infrastructure for enterprise AI transformation."


kakim@fnnews.com Kim Kyung-a Reporter