Crit Ventures Invests 2 Billion Won in Bunker Kids, Operator of AI Character Chat Platform
Venture capital firm Crit Ventures announced on July 15 that it has invested 2 billion won in Bunker Kids, the operator of the AI character chat platform 'WHIF'.
Founded in 2020, Bunker Kids is an AI company that has demonstrated its AI technology and marketability by successively selling its AI education service 'Data Diving' and its AI-based meal recommendation and delivery service 'MyShipdan'. In July of last year, the company launched WHIF in Korea, Taiwan, and Thailand, and overseas sales now account for 28% of its total revenue.
WHIF is an AI-based interactive content platform that allows users to converse with officially licensed webtoon and web novel intellectual property (IP) characters, as well as original AI characters, building narratives and creating storylines. The key feature of WHIF is that the story develops organically based on the user's choices. Among paying users, the daily average time spent on the platform is 217 minutes. Over the nine months since launch, the monthly payment volume has grown by an average of 110% per month, and the company has achieved profitability.
Bunker Kids plans to leverage this investment to pursue its entry into global markets such as Japan and the United States. The company will expand its portfolio of officially licensed IP, and will also introduce a wider range of AI interactive content genres beyond female-oriented stories.
Bunker Kids CEO Jeong Seunghwan commented, "As AI technology evolves, what matters most is not the model itself, but the content and IP competitiveness that can keep users engaged for longer periods of time. WHIF is not just a simple Q&A chatbot but an interactive platform, and we aim to create an innovative content ecosystem."
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Lim Yongmook, an investment manager at Crit Ventures, stated, "With the spread of generative AI, content consumption is rapidly evolving from viewing and reading to direct participation. We expect that Bunker Kids' capabilities in developing and commercializing AI services will be highly competitive in the global content market."
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