It can be run more cheaply than people, find price information better, and boost sales by up to 65%.
Commerce artificial intelligence (AI) agent startup Enhance was selected as the most promising startup in the digital field this year. Enhance was the only one in Korea chosen for the Startup Fellowship hosted by global tech company Palantir Technologies.
On the 3rd, Enhance won the grand prize at the 2025 K-Digital Grand Championship, hosted by the Ministry of Science and ICT and organized by the National IT Industry Promotion Agency (NIPA). Launched in 2022, the Digital Grand Championship is an integrated information and communications technology (ICT) competition jointly promoted by the government and the private sector.
Seven corporations out of 28 startups selected through various competition tracks advanced to this year's final stage and competed. The winning team was decided by the corporations' final presentations and Q&A.
The grand prize went to Enhance. As a commerce AI agent that performs automatic product price adjustments, ad management, and sales research, Enhance received the winner's trophy along with 50 million won in prize money.
Lee Seung-hyun, CEO of Enhance, said the AI agent can search for the lowest price more than 60 times faster than people. Lee added that there is no company like ours in the market yet and that they are expanding global sales power through partnerships.
Allmytour and IdeaOcean then received the top excellence award. Each was awarded 30 million won in prize money.
Allmytour supplies domestic hotel products favored by foreigners to some 2,000 travel agencies worldwide and to overseas online travel agencies with its self-developed global B2B cloud channeling solution. It also introduced the bed bank concept, which had been unfamiliar in Korea. A bed bank is a cloud highway that integrates hotel rooms in real time and supplies them to each sales channel.
Seok Young-gyu, CEO of Allmytour, said that with our system, business rooms at Myeong-dong hotels can be exposed to corporations in China, Japan, and Southeast Asia within one second, and that hotels can lower commission burdens while raising room occupancy rates, while sales partners can automate work with a low expense structure.
IdeaOcean is a startup that makes software to autonomously design device mechanisms such as robots, mobility, and machines. Based on this, it directly produces and sells hardware modules. Kim Joong-ho, CEO of IdeaOcean, noted that if you enter specific conditions such as mobility, healthcare, and aerospace and click the generate button, the mechanism comes out, and you can design as if you were shopping.
Avis won the excellence award. It was also awarded 20 million won. Avis is a corporations that developed Quanti, which uses AI to quantitatively analyze immunohistochemistry (IHC) images viewed under a microscope. It accurately determines the level of protein expression in cancer cells to raise pathology diagnosis concordance and help guide treatment decisions.
Lee Dae-hong, CEO of Avis, said they are expanding the product, starting with breast cancer, to be usable for other cancers as well, and said they are proving growth potential by signing a business agreement with Korea AstraZeneca.
Crosshub, which operates the Blockchain-based identity authentication service ID Block and the simple payment service BlockPay (B·Pay), also won the excellence award. Kim Jae-seol, CEO of Crosshub, said it is the corporations that received the top innovation award in Fintech at next year's CES, and explained that their pay service currently has 270,000 users in five overseas countries.
Park Yoon-gyu, head of the National IT Industry Promotion Agency (NIPA), said the government is making every effort to rebuild AI competitiveness by preemptively securing large-scale GPU resources and boldly expanding AI-related budgets, and said they are confident that the growth of each startup team and each corporations will open the future of Korea's industries and lead the global AI innovation trend.