South Korean AI-driven FinTech firm Akros Technologies raises $3.75M funding led by PeopleFund

South Korea-based artificial intelligence (AI)-driven asset management fintech start-up Akros Technologies (Akros) announced on Tuesday that it has raised $3.75 million led by South Korea-based peer-to-peer lending platform PeopleFund.

Under the mission “engineering disruptive finance”, Akros seeks to address the structural inefficiency in the current asset management industry by taking a data-centric scientific approach that enhances customer experience, Akros said in a statement.

As its first step, Akros plans to address the accumulating fees in the distribution of investment products that often involves a number of financial institutions in the process. By producing an AI-driven investment product itself and reducing the number of channels in the distribution of the investment products, it aims to decrease the fee by over 80 percent and transfer the benefit directly to customer values.

Akros was founded by the experienced trio Kyle Moon, Jin Chung, and Justin Gim in 2021 to accelerate the world’s access to “right financial services”. As a previous Head of AI Research and Chief Strategy Officer of Qraft Technologies, Moon has the experience of listing and managing four exchange traded funds (ETFs) on New York Stock Exchange using deep learning-based system. Chung has previously researched the application of Bayesian deep learning in autonomous driving at the Oxford Robotics Institute, while Justin has over nine years of experience in the asset management industry.

Since its establishment, Akros has developed its own data infrastructure and distributed computing environment that processes over 10TB+ point-in-time data dating from 1910 and trains AI models at a level comparable to global quantitative hedge funds. Based on the developed infrastructure, Akros is cooperating with index provider Moorgate Benchmarks, a subsidiary of Morningstar, to launch two indexes by the end of March. Subsequently, Akros is to enlist two ETFs this year that benchmark the indexes that it has developed.

Akros is planning to continuously update its proprietary AI models to maximize the performance of the data-driven ETFs. Over the course of the coming year, the team is also preparing to vertically expand its business with plans to enter the business to consumer (B2C) and hedge fund industry. Akros has previously acquired relevant investment advisory license in preparation for the launch of domestic B2C investment platform service.

The Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer Kyle Moon introduced Akros as “AI-based fintech start-up that employs vast data infrastructure and AI-driven technology to disrupt the finance industry”. He said “By focusing on Akros’ core strength in the asset management, we seek to provide the optimal investment options to both domestic and global investors while removing distribution margin of investment products to transfer Akros’ technological benefits to customer values”.

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