AI Ad Firm Adit & Arc Secures Seed Investment from Mashup Ventures and Others

A Youngest Product Owner from Toss Launches a Startup

Adit & Arc Corporation, which operates 'Adit', an AI-based Instagram organic view advertising service, announced on August 4 that it had secured seed investment from Mashup Ventures, Kakao Ventures, Base Ventures, and Biz Cafe (BZCF). The company's strength as a specialized team in the rapidly evolving advertising market appears to have been a key factor in the investment.

'Adit', operated by Adit & Arc, is a service that uses AI to identify and connect digital magazines and creators that best match a brand's products, campaign goals, and core target audience. Content is produced in formats such as feed, short-form, and story, optimized for the characteristics of each platform. Based on a network of more than 70 Instagram digital magazines, Adit currently supports brand campaigns across a range of industries, including fashion, beauty, and food and beverage.

Adit is changing the organic view advertising market by introducing the concept of Feed Engine Optimization (FEO), which optimizes how brands and content are discovered within feeds and recommendation algorithms using data-driven approaches. Instead of relying solely on follower counts or historical views, the service analyzes content topics, user engagement, and brand suitability from multiple perspectives using AI models. It accumulates data from the campaigns it directly manages, continually enhancing the matching accuracy between brands and media channels.

CEO Choi Hyungbin previously founded 'CoronaNow', a real-time COVID-19 information service, while he was a middle school student and grew it to a user base of 30 million. While attending the Department of Computer Science at KAIST, he developed the wellness service 'Kkokkio Alarm', which secured hundreds of thousands of monthly active users in both Korea and Japan. He later became the youngest product owner (PO) at Toss, leading product design based on user behavior data.

CEO Choi remarked, "We have identified the importance of feeds and recommendation algorithms at the interface between brands and consumers and are developing our own analytical models and data-driven solutions." He continued, "With this investment, we will strengthen our brand and media network and grow into a media company that expands K-Content and K-Culture globally."

Park Eunwoo, Vice President of Mashup Ventures, who led this investment, stated, "The advertising market is shifting from click-driven performance ads and influencer-based advertising to magazine-style content, but there has not been a clear leader in this trend." He added, "We rated this team's potential highly because the founder has successfully launched multiple consumer services, and its members have demonstrated deep domain expertise and longstanding collaboration."

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.