ActionPower Secures KRW 6 Billion Series B to Fuel Global AI Workflow Expansion

Key Takeaways

1. ActionPower closed a KRW 6 billion ($4.1M) Series B round led by Hana Ventures, with Korea Development Bank joining as a new investor alongside returning backers We Ventures and Tony Investment.
2. Total cumulative funding now exceeds KRW 20 billion ($13.7M), positioning ActionPower among South Korea’s well-funded multimodal AI startups.​
3. Flagship product Daglo posted nearly 4x year-over-year revenue growth, with cumulative voice processing surpassing 13 million hours by 2025 and B2B revenue growing approximately 40% YoY.​
4. Funds will be directed toward global market entry, product enhancement, and expansion of B2B AI agent solutions targeting enterprise task automation and decision support.​

Quick Recap

South Korean AI startup ActionPower has raised KRW 6 billion (approximately $4.1 million) in a Series B round, the company announced on March 5, 2026. Hana Ventures led the investment, with existing backers We Ventures and Tony Investment returning alongside new investors including the Korea Development Bank. The fresh capital pushes ActionPower’s total funding past the KRW 20 billion mark, reinforcing investor confidence in its multimodal AI technology and commercial trajectory.

A Decade of Proprietary AI Driving Business Impact

ActionPower was co-founded in 2016 by Jihwa Lee, a former Stanford Research Institute engineer, and Hongsik Jo, a former Macquarie Securities analyst. The company has spent close to 10 years building high-performance, lightweight multimodal AI models that process voice, text, and image data in an integrated pipeline. This proprietary approach sets it apart from competitors that rely on third-party large language models.

The company’s core product, Daglo, is one of South Korea’s leading AI-powered transcription and workflow tools. Originally launched in 2017 as a speech-to-text service, Daglo now supports 16 languages, offers AI-generated meeting summaries, presentation slides, and quiz creation, and has grown to over 1.5 million subscribers. Its speech recognition engine delivers approximately 95% accuracy in controlled environments and has been validated through more than 70 domestic and international patents.

On the enterprise side, ActionPower has assembled a notable B2B client roster that includes DB Life Insurance, Hancom, Daegu City Government, Seoul National University Hospital, and KT SkyLife. The company supports both on-premise and cloud deployments, a flexibility that appeals to regulated industries such as healthcare and insurance. With B2B revenue growing around 40% year-over-year, the commercial momentum is clearly translating beyond its consumer user base.

Enterprise AI Agents and Global Expansion

The timing of this raise aligns with a broader shift in the enterprise AI market. Businesses are moving beyond basic chatbots and information retrieval tools toward AI agents that can automate complex workflows and support real-time decision-making. ActionPower’s strategy directly targets this transition, with plans to develop industry-specific AI agent solutions that handle task automation across corporate environments.​

South Korea’s startup investment landscape is also showing signs of recovery heading into 2026. The Ministry of SMEs and Startups recently injected KRW 2.14 trillion into its fund-of-funds program, and deep-tech and AI startups have been among the primary beneficiaries of renewed venture capital activity. ActionPower’s raise fits squarely within this momentum.

Co-CEOs Hongsik Jo and Jihwa Lee framed the investment as validation of the company’s direction. “As AI evolves from simply providing information to actually executing tasks, we will push forward on automating personal-data-driven workflows, enhancing productivity, and accelerating our global expansion,” they stated. Hana Ventures echoed this sentiment, noting ActionPower’s “top-tier technical capabilities in multimodality” and the fact that its B2B and B2C businesses have entered a genuine growth phase.​

Competitive Landscape

ActionPower operates in a competitive Korean AI voice and workflow automation market. Two of its most relevant peers at a comparable stage are ReturnZero (operator of the VITO/Callabo platform) and Naver’s Clova Note (backed by the Naver corporation but competing in the same product space).

ActionPower leads in multimodal breadth and on-premise deployment options, making it a strong fit for regulated industries that require data sovereignty. ReturnZero holds an edge in raw Korean-language voice processing depth, with over 15 million hours of training data powering its speech engine. Clova Note benefits from Naver’s ecosystem reach and brand recognition, which gives it a larger consumer footprint, though it lacks the independent, startup-driven agility and patent portfolio that ActionPower brings to B2B deals.

Bayelsa Watch’s Takeaway

I think this is a quietly significant raise for a company that has been building in a disciplined, technology-first manner for nearly a decade. In my experience covering AI startups across Asia, the ones that survive and scale tend to be the ones that own their core models rather than wrapping APIs around someone else’s foundation. ActionPower fits that profile. With 70+ patents, a 4x revenue jump on Daglo, and real enterprise clients in healthcare and insurance, this is not a hype-driven round.

I am particularly interested in their AI agent play. The market is flooded with companies talking about “agentic AI,” but ActionPower’s combination of lightweight proprietary models, on-premise deployment capability, and nearly a decade of multimodal R&D gives them a genuine technical moat to deliver on that promise. The KRW 6 billion is modest by global standards, but in the context of Korea’s startup funding environment, it is a vote of confidence from serious institutional backers like Korea Development Bank and Hana Ventures.