The Ministry of Science, ICT & Future Planning announced on August 31 that a Korea Polytechnic University research team led by professor Yoon Won-soo developed a 3D bioprinting system for producing medical products by the use of biomaterials and developed a preparation for medical use for tissue regeneration that can be dissolved in the human body.Earlier in March this year, the research team developed a biodegradable mesh for facial bone surgeries and obtained an approval from the Ministry of Food & Drug Safety (MFDS). At present, patients with damage to facial bones have to go through the extraction of other bones from their own bodies and transplantation following cutting of the bones for shaping. However, 3D printing allows perfectly-shaped prostheses to be produced and inserted without bones having to be cut. In addition, the average surgical operation time can be shortened to two hours or less from eight hours or so. The research team developed the preparation by using the FDA-approved biodegradable medical polymer material of polycaprolactone (PCL). This material dissolves and disappears by itself a couple of years after transplantation and, as such, has a lower risk of side effects than many other transplants remaining in the body for a long period of time to cause inflammation. The preparation was put on the market in the first half of this year by T&R Biofab, a company founded by the professor.The 3D bioprinting system that Korea Polytechnic University developed at this time in cooperation with Pohang University of Science & Technology (POSTECH) and the Seoul St. Mary's Hospital is characterized by being capable of using various types of biomaterials in an integrated way unlike similar systems developed in the United States and so on. The research team developed a product in which PCL is combined with tricalcium phosphate (TCP) for bone regeneration with this system and applied for an MFDS approval. This system is expandable in the form of a cell printing system that produces different human body tissues and organs by outputting bioink containing living cells and is expected to be able to take the place of organ donation in the long term.  -Written Cho Jin-young, 1 September 2016, Business Korea 

In multiple deals in the region, Seoul-based Zoyi Corporation, Tokyo-based Triple W Japan & Hong Kong-based BottlesXO have secured growth funding to expand their business operations in the Asia Pacific. Zoyi Corporation closes $3.93m Series B Seoul-based Zoyi Corporation, which provides the Walk Insights offline customer analysis service and Channel.io online sales support service, has raised JPY 450 million ($3.93 million ) in a Series B round led by KDDI Open Innovation Fund (KOIF), a joint fund between Japanese VC firm Global Brain and telecom firm KDDI. Incepted in 2014, it has raised about 300 million won ($270,000) from Bon Angels and Fast Track Asia in 2014. This was followed by a Series A round of 2 billion won ($1.8 million) from Korea Investment Partners and Aju IB Investment.   Triple W Japan closes $3.9m pre-Series B from Nissay Capital & Foxconn Tokyo-based Triple W Japan, which developed urination predictor device DFree, has raised JPY 500 million ($4.39 million) pre-Series B round from existing investors Nissay Capital and 2020, the Japanese investment partner fund of Taiwanese electronics developer Foxconn. Nissay Capital is a returning investor, having backed its seed round in April 2015. It has raised JPY 1.5 billion ($13.1 million) in equity funding to date. It plans to raise JPY 1 billion ($8.79 million) in a Series B round next year, with investors in the latest round exchanging convertible notes into common stock upon the Series B round closing. Triple W Japan has rolled out the DFree urination prediction device into 150 nursery care facilities across Japan. Beyond being deployed in a major Singapore hospital, it is also aiming to develop sales channels in the US market.   BottlesXO closes $3.4m pre-Series A Hong Kong-based on-demand alcoholic beverage delivery services startup BottlesXO has raised a $3.4 million Pre-Series A round from an undisclosed private equity (PE) firm in Singapore. This latest round brings aggregate equity funding to $6.3 million and will see investment proceeds go towards technology upgrades, business expansion and development of new product lines. It expects to close its Series A round in 2018. Its competitors include NOX Express, WisePass, Alcohol Delivery Singapore, Drink2Connect, and others. Currently, BottlesXO operates in Shanghai, Suzhou, Hong Kong and Singapore and claims that its in-house operations team can deliver beverages to customers within 30 minutes- Written by Shiwen Yap, 08-11-17, Deal Street Asia 

Mangoplate, a service akin to Yelp in Korea, is in the money today after closing a $6.1 million Series A round to expand in its domestic market and branch out into other parts of Asia.The round was led by Qualcomm Ventures and included participation from SoftBank Ventures Korea and YJ Capital. The latter is the venture capital firm from Yahoo Japan, which made its first investment in Korea with this deal and recently became an LP in Southeast Asia-based Monk’s Hill Venture’s fund.Mangoplate, which emerged from Seoul-based accelerator program SparkLabs two years ago and previously scooped $600,000 in funding from SparkLabs Ventures and $800,000 from SoftBank Korea, has now raised $7.2 million from investors in total. The company counts 200,000 restaurants on its platform and is closing in on one million downloads, of which around 250,000 are monthly active users, co-founder Joon Oh told TechCrunch in an interview.Oh estimated that Mangoplate currently has around 40 percent of Korea’s restaurants right now, and it is aiming to double that to around 80 percent with the next year. A full set of 100 percent is tricky due to restaurant in the competition Korean market, Oh said. (He estimates that around 500 restaurants close per day across the country.)The service is available in Korean and English, but its biggest selling point is personalization. That’s to say that, rather than just serving up deals, it uses algorithms and data to curate restaurant deals based on a user’s location — and location history — and their cuisine preference.“Lots of companies claim to use big data, but just crawl [Korea’s top internet portal] Naver and blogs. It’s not personalized in any way, so your result is the same as your friends and others,” Oh said. “Mangoplate really is a big data-driven personalization service, it’s like Yelp on steroids.”Right now, the company isn’t making money because it isn’t done scaling, but Oh said that it will roll out money-making features by the middle of next year. One major area of focus will be leaning on the app’s bucketlist-like feature — which lets users mark restaurants they are interested in — to allow restaurants owners to offer targeted offers to consumers who have shown an interest in their shop.Mid 2016 is also the timeframe for potential expansions too, Oh revealed. Right now, Mangoplate is eying markets with similarities to Seoul — such as Singapore and Hong Kong — but Oh made it clear that building a strong position in Korea is top priority for now.“It will take some times to become a leader in this market,” he said. “We will need to raise another round for the expansion, but we can start testing [overseas cities] with this funding round.”Mangoplate’s opportunity in Korea presented itself after the government ordered domestic internet giant Naver to shutter Wingspoon, the country’s dominant food discovery service that it acquired, back in 2013. Wingspoon had been plagued by fake reviews and restaurants gaming its system. Oh said Mangoplate has a number of systems in place to detect suspect behavior, but he declined to provide specifics in order to avoid giving the game away. (One method is sign-in via Facebook or Kakao, although that doesn’t remove the issue entirely.)Oh had praise for Mangoplate’s investors, explaining that their mix of international know-how and mentorship will be vital for the service’s future.“Having these mentors has been really really helpful. A-calibre investors are critical especially when we want to raise a bigger round from investors outside of Korea — having those names is very important,” he said.  FEATURED IMAGE: SHUTTERSTOCK - Written by Jon Russell(@jonrussell), 30-06-15, Tech Crunch​

Gurgaon-based Balancehero India Pvt. Ltd is set to receive fresh capital infusion, as the operator of a mobile balance-checking app plans to expand its service offerings after launching a digital wallet last month.The company, which operates under the True Balance brand, plans to raise Rs 351 crore ($55.2 million) by issuing compulsorily convertible debentures to its Seoul-based parent Balancehero Co. Ltd Korea, its filings with the Ministry of Corporate Affairs show. The startup has received Rs 13.89 crore in three tranches over the past four months, the filings show.The fund infusion comes in the backdrop of its announcementlast month that it was launching a mobile wallet, besides other financial services including peer-to-peer and wallet-to-bank-account transfers. At the time, the company had said the mobile wallet was intrinsic to its strategy to increase revenue.The filings also show that True Balance intends to foray into ancillary payments services, including domestic money remittances, bill payments and financials transactions for online and retail merchants. The timeline for the launch of these offerings was, however, not disclosed.An email query to True Balance founder and CEO Charlie Lee seeking more information did not elicit any response till the time of publishing this report.Lee, an alumnus of the University of Chicago, founded True Balance in September 2014. The company’s India operations were launched in April 2016. The Korean entrepreneur had a previous stint in India when he led the country operations for Internet streaming media delivery firm Real Networks in 2002.In March 2016, SoftBank Ventures Korea had invested an undisclosed amount in the company as part of its Series A round. SoftBank Ventures was established in 2000 as a subsidiary of Japanese Internet and telecom conglomerate SoftBank Group.In February last year, True Balance raised a $15-million (Rs 100 crore) Series B round led by SoftBank Ventures. IMM Investment Group, Mega Investment, Korea Development Bank and Capston Partners also invested in that round.The company’s latest filings indicate that its fundraising plan is significantly higher than the external funding it has raised so far. Hence, it is quite likely that the Korean parent might have raised some follow-on funding. However, VCCircle could not independently verify this.True Balance initially operated only a mobile balance-checking app. This app allowed prepaid Android smartphone users to check their mobile and data balance, without an internet connection. It also offered recharge services. In November 2017, it had said that the Android app had recorded over 50 million downloads on Google Play Store.In 2016-17, True Balance clocked gross revenue of Rs 57.73 lakh while income from its core operations stood at Rs 48.52 lakh. Gross expenses stood at Rs 32.66 crore. Consequently, the company registered a net loss of Rs 32.08 crore. Since the India entity was registered on April 28, 2016, the company did not file its financials for 2015-16.In the mobile wallet segment, True Balance competes with the likes of Paytm, Mobikwik and Flipkart’s Phonepe, besides Amazon Pay. Market leaders Paytm and Mobikwik, too, had started off as mobile recharge platforms.Subsequently, both Paytm and Mobikwik broadened the scope of their offerings to include bill payments, booking travel and movie tickets, and facilitated payments for online and offline commerce platforms. Paytm has also launched its payments bank, besides e-commerce site Paytm Mall. It counts SoftBank as its largest investor, after raising $1.4 billion from the Japanese firm last year.   - Written by Bijatakumar Pitchiah, 25-01-18, News Corp VCCIRCLE

SEOUL, South Korea, Dec. 30, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- X-rays are a form of electromagnetic radiation used to detect and diagnose various injuries and diseases, such as bone fractures, lung cancer, and breast cancer. Compared to computed tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans, x-rays are simpler and relatively less expensive. However, since the images must still be interpreted by doctors, the technique still has one critical weakness: occasionally, doctors fail to notice the signs of disease.Lunit's AI interprets x-ray images and lowers the misdiagnosis rateLunit Inc. has developed a deep learning-based technology for analyzing medical images that dramatically lowers the rate of misdiagnosis.Lunit Inc., a member company of the K-ICT Born2Global Centre, has developed a deep learning-based technology for analyzing medical images that dramatically lowers the rate of misdiagnosis. Currently, the AI technology is being subjected to a sophistication process in cooperation with major medical institutions in Korea, including Seoul National University Hospital, Severance Hospital of Yonsei University Health System, Samsung Medical Center, and Asan Medical Center.Anthony Paek, the CEO of Lunit, explained, "The data-driven imaging biomarker (DIB) technology that Lunit proposed for the first time ever in 2015 is an AI system that has learned abnormal and clinically significant image patterns from big data." He went on to add, "Currently, DIB technology has achieved an accuracy level comparable to that of human experts. In the future, however, we will have new DIB technologies capable of outperforming humans."Lunit's DIB technology, called Lunit INSIGHT, uses AI technology to analyze existing x-ray images to help doctors make more accurate diagnoses. So far, the results of clinical trials have shown that using this technology increases diagnostic accuracy by 14 percentage points. Based on deep learning, an AI skill-building practice that makes use of big data and artificial neural network technologies, Lunit INSIGHT is capable of accurately analyzing images. Paek explained, "Most medical imaging AIs have been directly and indirectly influenced by DIB technology. Since we now have access to the big data of hospitals and are capable of processing DIB learning from various perspectives, the future potential of our company seems quite high."The top AI dream team in the world--better than those of Google and TencentWith a medical AI research team consisting of 12 deep learning researchers and three medical doctors, Lunit has developed the best deep learning and computer vision technologies in the world. At the 2015 ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Competition, it ranked fifth in terms of object detection and localization, surpassing the teams of Google and Tencent. Lunit's technology has gained recognition around the world through the company's participation in international competitions, ranking first in the Tumor Proliferation Assessment Challenge (TUPAC) in 2016 and Camelyon in December 2017. Also in 2017, Lunit was also the only Korean company included on CB Insights' "AI 100," which ranks the 100 most promising AI companies in the world, and secured an investment from K Cube Ventures, SoftBank Ventures, Formation 8, and Mirae Asset Venture Investment.Lunit unveiled Lunit INSIGHT, its AI-based real-time medical image analysis software, at the end of November at the Radiological Society of North America in Chicago. Able to accurately detect the signs of major lung diseases, such as lung cancer, pneumonia, pneumothorax, and tuberculosis, from x-ray images, Lunit INSIGHT rapidly processes medical images to provide results in only seconds after the images are uploaded and boasts an accuracy of 98 percent. The software is expected to be used for clinical purposes in hospitals and medical centers starting in the second half of 2018.Lunit CEO Paek said, "Lunit INSIGHT is the first AI-based medical image analysis program in the world that has been released in a final, usable state. Through this release, we plan to expand the basis for the industry so that more medical professionals can gain easy access to such image analysis software." In the first half of the next year, Lunit is expected to unveil a mammography solution that allows doctors to use Lunit INSIGHT for the early diagnosis of breast cancer.For more detailed information on the Lunit, visit https://lunit.io/- News Provided by K-ICT Born2Global Centre, 30-12-17