▲ AI PRISM* Personalized Economic Briefing
* Editor's note: AI PRISM (Personalized Report & Insight Summarizing Media) is an artificial intelligence-based personalized news recommendation and summary service developed with support from the Korea Press Foundation. It selects and provides six news items tailored to each reader type.
[Key Issue Briefing]
■ AI Valuation Debate: Anthropic, which is preparing an initial public offering (IPO) this year, is sustaining steep revenue growth, but skepticism over its room for further expansion is deepening among investors. With OpenAI's rise, a low-price offensive from Chinese open-source artificial intelligence (AI) models and calls within the AI industry to slow the pace all converging, forecasts for the company's post-listing valuation are sharply divided.
■ K-Unicorn Exodus: K-unicorns valued at $1 billion or more are pursuing listings in the U.S., including on the Nasdaq, rather than at home, in hopes of higher valuations. Large public offerings are rare on the KOSDAQ, and with trading value and the index both retreating, the market has little to hold promising companies with.
■ Technology Hegemony Race: China is pulling ahead of the U.S. in securing training data for robot AI, as local governments add humanoid robot innovation centers. The Korean government, meanwhile, is moving to create a dedicated organization to oversee its seven SEED projects, accelerating efforts to nurture future technologies as a next-generation growth engine.
[News of Interest to Startup Founders]
- Key summary: Skepticism is growing over how much further Anthropic can expand as it prepares an IPO this year. According to the Financial Times, the company's annualized revenue surged to $65 billion as of July, and is expected to top $120 billion by the end of this year. The FT described this as growth on a par with the fastest-growing company in history. But OpenAI, after releasing GPT-5.6 in July, has won corporate customers with aggressive pricing and overtook Anthropic in weekly customer spending on OpenRouter for the first time in two and a half years, while China's Moonshot AI and DeepSeek are fueling price competition with models of comparable performance. With market forecasts for the post-listing valuation ranging from $1.5 trillion to $4 trillion, The Wall Street Journal reported that the listing has been pushed to November from October as originally expected.
2. [Dawn] Let's Send K-Unicorns to the KOSDAQ
- Key summary: Concerns have been raised that the KOSDAQ is losing vitality as K-unicorns expecting valuations in the trillions of won turn away from the market. Since the KOSDAQ opened in 1996, only one IPO has raised more than 1 trillion won: Celltrion Healthcare in 2017. Yanolja, Toss (Viva Republica) and Galaxy Corporation are pursuing U.S. listings for higher valuations. In global markets this year, SpaceX listed on the Nasdaq while China's ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT) and Unitree debuted on the Shanghai Stock Exchange's STAR Market, making their presence felt from the first day of trading. Measures under discussion to strengthen the market include steering companies backed by the National Growth Fund to the KOSDAQ, offering incentives, and introducing a promotion-and-relegation system along with the delisting of zombie companies.
3. Shift Up (462870) CEO Kim Hyung-tae: "We Will Broaden Platforms to Grow Users for New Titles"
- Key summary: Shift Up is moving into self-publishing in earnest in global markets, including Japan. At a press conference on the 18th, during Tokyo Game Show (TGS) 2026, Shift Up CEO Kim Hyung-tae said the company had been preparing self-publishing for about a year and would build its own structure to distribute the games it develops in the most optimal way. Kim also said the wider the platform coverage, the more chances there are to meet new user groups, presenting multiplatform expansion as a core direction. "Stellar Blade," a PlayStation 5 (PS5) exclusive in 2024, followed its PC version and will expand to the Nintendo Switch 2 in November. Kim recalled a desperate period when the company had only about three months of funds left to pay staff salaries and he ran around to attract investment, adding that most investors at the time saw Stellar Blade as a risk rather than an asset.
[Reference News for Startup Founders]
- Key summary: According to U.S. data-labeling firm Scale AI, China accounts for about 90% of commercially available robot AI data, and its data production costs are 60% lower than in the U.S. After China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology released a roadmap to foster humanoid robots in October 2023, 22 innovation centers went up across the country in just 14 months, an unusually fast pace compared with the two to three years it took in electric vehicles and semiconductors. Local governments run robot companies and centers to produce training data, but purchase demand is not sufficient, leaving concerns about overinvestment. A training center in Beijing's Shijingshan district terminated its contract with a partner company over data quality and sales revenue. Chen Tao, head of the Deep Learning Research Institute at Fudan University, said robot vision-language-action (VLA) models are skewed toward successful data, stressing that true self-evolution is possible only when systems correct errors on their own and turn them into experience.
- Key summary: The Ministry of Science and ICT will create a new organization this year dedicated to its seven SEED projects. The new unit will be set up under the science, technology and artificial intelligence (AI) policy cooperation officer, who reports directly to Bae Kyung-hoon, deputy prime minister and minister of science and ICT. The plan is to abolish the existing future strategy officer early next month and put in its place an organization built around the themes of "future" and "pioneering." The seven SEED projects, announced at a briefing presided over by President Lee Jae-myung on the 12th of last month, cover small modular reactors (SMRs), nuclear fusion, renewable energy, quantum technology, space and aviation, advanced biotechnology and advanced supply chains. The government has set goals including securing a 100-qubit domestic quantum computer by 2029 and building an independent low-Earth-orbit satellite communications network by 2035, and plans to establish a whole-of-government support system.
6. AI Calculates Arrival Times Automatically; Delivery Apps Now Compete on Accuracy
- Key summary: Delivery app operators are competing to improve service quality using artificial intelligence (AI) and data. Baedal Minjok will apply a system from next month in which AI automatically predicts and informs customers of delivery times when they order, drawing on 58 types of data including delivery status by restaurant, local congestion levels and rider availability to achieve prediction accuracy more than 1.7 times higher than the previous method, in which restaurant owners entered the information themselves. Coupang Eats has developed a "store coordinate optimization" technology that analyzes pickup locations, delivery partner movement data and road information to guide riders to exact store locations, and said inquiries about locations and cases of long delivery times have fallen since its introduction. As of last month, Baedal Minjok's monthly active users (MAU) stood at 24.4 million, up 5.8% from a year earlier, while Coupang Eats rose 23.0% to 14.44 million, intensifying the chase.
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