South Korean artificial intelligence (AI)-driven fintech start-up Akros Technologies announced on Friday the that it has raised $2.3 milion in a strategic funding round prior to the scheduled Series A funding round next year.

The strategic investment was led by ZVC, the corporate venture capital (CVC) of Z Holdings which has global mobile platform LINE Corporation, and Yahoo Japan as its subsidiaries, Akros Technologies said in a statement.

The company will utilize the fund raised to further scale its investment product line-ups and partner with both local and global financial institutions already in discussion to expand the portfolio management as a service (PMaaS) business through multiple product launches.

“Akros Technologies continues to focus on engineering technology to disrupt asset management by boosting its fund business and by attracting new global players to expand the boundaries of the traditional asset management,” said its Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer Kyle Moon.

Founded in 2021, Akros Technologies is an AI-driven fintech start-up with the mission “engineering disruptive finance”.

Stemming from its core strength in asset management, the firm serves to provide “better yield and better return” to investors worldwide by developing and managing investment products with planned expansion into Asia, Europe and North America.

The firm manages its own exchange traded funds (ETFs) powered by proprietary machine learning models and private computing cloud.

The company has recently launched its second line of business termed PMaaS to provide business to business (B2B) clients with the cloud-based modern infrastructure to help build their own investment products from simple ideation to actual product launch.

Last May, Akros Technologies launched ‘Akros Monthly Payout ETF’ which aims for monthly distributions at an annualized target rate of 7 percent, and more recently, assisted its B2B client to list the ‘KPOP and Korean Entertainment ETF’ on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE).

 “Development in technology and infrastructure has brought prominent changes in finance. While its effect on payments, remittances, and lending domains has been significant, the impact on asset management is still believed to be at a preliminary stage,” said Yousik Han, Principal at ZVC.

Han further commented that “Akros’ AI-driven PMaaS Solution, subject to both asset managers and non-asset managers alike, provides them with the opportunity to develop high-quality investment products at a low cost and is thereby expected to offer more value to end-customers”.

As a strategic investor, he said ZVC also plans to support Akros’ business expansion from multiple angles.

The core competencies of Akros Technologies are its precise data infrastructure, hardware infrastructure and human resources.

The firm’s data infrastructure processes over 100,000 point-in-time data points of five million types ranging from company fundamentals and price data, natural language data including those from social media and news.

Its hardware infrastructure allocates over 140,000 computing cores for researchers to conduct experiments on parallel data pre-processing, deep learning model training and inference, and other meta-research.

Akros Technologies was founded by the experienced trio Kyle Moon, Jin Chung, and Justin Gim. The company currently has seven employees.

South Korean AI-driven FinTech firm Akros Technologies bags $3.75M funding led by PeopleFund