The Ventures Invests in AI Inference Infrastructure Startup AnyBridge, Recommends It for TIPS

Co-founded by KAIST School of Computing Professors Park Jongse and Kwon Youngjin
Cutting AI infrastructure inference costs by 40% to 70%

Artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure software startup AnyBridge has raised seed funding and been selected for the Ministry of SMEs and Startups’ TIPS program.

The Ventures, a venture capital firm specializing in global early-stage investments, announced on Thursday that it had completed a seed investment in AnyBridge. Recommended by The Ventures, AnyBridge was selected for the Ministry of SMEs and Startups’ TIPS program and signed an agreement on Wednesday. Through TIPS, AnyBridge will receive up to KRW 800 million in research and development (R&D) funding over the next two years.

AnyBridge was co-founded by Park Jongse and Kwon Youngjin, professors in the School of Computing at KAIST. The company is developing a “multi-accelerator runtime”—an environment for running large language models (LLMs)—that uses different AI accelerators, including graphics processing units (GPUs), neural processing units (NPUs), and processing-in-memory (PIM) chips, according to the needs of each service, as well as an enterprise AI agent platform. Using a common interface that is not tied to specific hardware, it aims to automatically assign the most suitable chips for inference tasks based on factors such as response speed, cost, and model size, reducing inference costs by 40% to 70% compared with GPU-only infrastructure.

The technology behind AnyBridge is LLMServingSim, an open-source LLM serving simulator released by a research team led by CEO Park Jongse. The simulator won the Best Paper Award and the Outstanding Artifact Award at the 2024 IEEE International Symposium on Workload Characterization (IISWC). Follow-up research was accepted at the 2026 International Symposium on Performance Analysis of Systems and Software (ISPASS) and also won the symposium’s Best Paper Award.

AnyBridge won the grand prize among around 60 participating companies in the “Kakao AI Fostering Project.” Last September, it signed a business agreement with domestic AI semiconductor companies FuriosaAI and HyperAccel to jointly develop an NPU-based enterprise AI agent platform.

The investment and TIPS funding will be used to develop products and conduct customer trials for enterprise AI agents and AI infrastructure software. AnyBridge plans to launch pilot projects with two to three customers by the end of the year. It also plans to validate service performance and operational stability in a cloud environment through a proof of concept (PoC) with KakaoCloud. Based on these efforts, the company plans to launch its full-fledged product in 2027.

Kim Cheolwoo, CEO of The Ventures, which led the investment, said, “As more companies use generative AI in actual services, the burden of operating costs is growing just as much as concerns about model performance. AnyBridge is a team that can expand LLM operating environments beyond GPUs to a range of AI semiconductors, and we expect it to significantly reduce the cost of AI adoption for businesses.”

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