Skelter Labs Targets Expansion into Southeast Asia after Raising Capital from Golden Gate

Skelter Labs—the popular AI startup from Seoul, South Korea—has made a major announcement with its plan to enter the Southeast Asian market. The announcement came as a result of its success with raising capital from Golden Gate Ventures—a Singaporean venture capital firm.

In 2015, Ted Cho created Skelter Labs. Cho boasts a strong technical background: he was an engineering site director in Korea’s branch of Google. The company first delved in AI by designing mobile apps that made use of AI and provided services where AI added an edge to enhance user experiences.

After getting newfound success with AI, the company entirely began to concentrate on artificial intelligence technologies. These AI-based services are provided to businesses and organizations with which Skelter Labs has formed a partnership.

Recently, the company expressed interest in expansion across Southeast Asia—the region has a population of 600 million. Most of the focus is directed towards Malaysia, Vietnam, and Thailand. Additionally, opportunities are also explored in Japan by the company officials.

This year, the company managed to raise capital with a seed round totaling $9 million. Also, Golden Gate pushed further impetus to the round where KakaoBrain—the AI-based arm of Korea’s messaging brand Kakao, Stonebridge Ventures, Lotte Homeshopping—the online shopping and TV department of Lotto—were the other notable participants.

Going deeper in the services of Skelter Labs, the startup is mainly associated with providing AI-based services for voice, speech, vision, and “context recognition”—an area where the early AI solutions struggled to replicate the human touch of extracting context out of situations. Generally, the company serves to a multitude of consumers with focus on customer operations, consumer marketing, device interaction, and manufacturing.

The company is known to provide disclosure for its clients. However, it explained to TechCrunch that its ultimate AI conception is geared towards bringing machine learning closer to the daily routine lives of people. Some instances of its use can be the adoption of the widespread technology, AI-powered virtual assistants that are being used in smartphones, automobile, wearables, and smart speakers.

Golden Gate is known to be of the most prominent and oldest technology venture capital firms from Southeast Asia. The latest deal is actually linked with the announcement of its third fund—valued at $100 million.

Cho praised the VC’s impact in Southeast Asian markets and believes that Skelter Labs may gain new-found success with this deal. Other companies that boast of impressive credentials on the portfolio of Golden Gate include Carro—an auto portal, Carousell—the mobile listings brand, Grana—a commerce website known for fashion products, and Hipvan—seller of online furnishings.