This article was displayed on the ChosunBiz MoneyMove (MM) site at 3:36 p.m. on Jul. 2, 2026.
LinqAlpha, a startup developing artificial intelligence (AI) agents specialized in financial investment, raised more than 30 billion won in a Series A funding round. Major domestic venture capital (VC) firms such as Atinum Investment and Mirae Asset Venture Investment, as well as securities companies, joined as strategic investors (SI).
On the 2nd, according to the VC industry, LinqAlpha recently completed a new funding round worth 34 billion won. It came about a year after last year's seed round of 9 billion won, with more than 30 billion won raised at once in the Series A round, considered a startup's first full-fledged fundraising.
Atinum Investment led LinqAlpha's Series A round as the lead investor. In addition, VC arms of financial groups, including Mirae Asset Venture Investment, Hana Ventures, and Shinhan Venture Investment, joined en masse as new investors. NH Investment & Securities and Samsung Securities also participated as SIs.
LinqAlpha launched in 2021 as a startup developing an AI partner for financial investing using large language models (LLMs). Chief Executive Choi Chanyeol, who completed a Ph.D. program in electrical engineering and computer science at MIT, co-founded the company with Chief Executive Choi Hojun, who worked at global investment banks including Goldman Sachs and Macquarie.
LinqAlpha is already regarded as a hot startup in the U.S. hedge fund industry. From filings to what chief executives (CEOs) say on social media (SNS) and in official settings, the company integrates it all into a single AI system, gaining word-of-mouth as a "platform that can expand investment insights."
Investors were seen as highly valuing LinqAlpha's technological competitiveness. Instead of having its AI model generate answers solely from internal knowledge, the company developed retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) technology that references external documents in real time, and it ranked No. 1 worldwide on MTEB, a global AI benchmark.
Another strength cited is that LinqAlpha has secured global hedge funds and asset managers as clients, establishing a revenue base. LinqAlpha is said to have signed up a diverse set of institutional investors as customers, including Fidelity, BNP Paribas, and Schonfeld, as well as global hedge funds and asset managers.
The company plans to use the new funding to expand hiring of AI and finance experts and strengthen its global business. It is currently running global operations around four hubs—Korea, the United States, Hong Kong, and Singapore—and also plans to develop next-generation AI agent products.
A VC industry official said, "The reason NH Investment & Securities and Samsung Securities participated as SIs is that they highly valued the fact that this is an AI platform validated on the ground in actual financial institutions, beyond a simple financial investment," adding, "Another strength of LinqAlpha is that the system becomes more sophisticated as usage increases."