Winner of XTC Korea Advances to Global AI:360 Summit
It was an honor to partner with Korea’s National IT Industry Promotion Agency (NIPA) and Global Digital Innovation Network (GDIN) to present XTC Korea this month.
🏆 Congratulations to Omelet, our award winner! They are commercializing over 10 years of combinatorial optimization research from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), into AI that makes the operational decisions upon which enterprises run – vehicle routing, vessel stowage, inventory allocation and nurse scheduling – without needing an operations research specialist to drive it. Customers already in production include GS Retail and Hyundai Glovis, where logistics costs are down by more than 20%. At a major university hospital in Korea, nurse rostering has gone from two weeks to five minutes. We look forward to seeing OMELET present their excellent applied AI at our AI:360 Summit on November 19.
NIPA and GDIN  presented eight carefully selected promising startups, each impressive and innovative in their own right. In addition to the winner Omelet, the other finalists were:
- Codepresso
- AI Skills Assessment and Training Platform (SkillCertify, AI Fluent, and SkillFit) is an AI-powered B2B HR intelligence SaaS that assesses employees’ job-specific and AI capabilities through real-world projects and connects the results to personalized training and career development through a unified competency data pipeline.
- CrosshubÂ
- VPAY is a Voice AI payment solution that merges self-sovereign identity, voice authentication, and targeted advertising into a single transaction – turning the 5-second checkout wait into a secure, verifiable, and monetizable moment.
- Ecube Labs
- A global smart waste management company that combines integrated hardware, software, and its U.S.-based Haulla platform to optimize waste collection, currently serving 35 cities across 20 U.S. states.
- Lillycover
- Their integrated platform connects AI-powered skin and scalp analysis with personalized formulation and on-demand manufacturing. Skin conditions are converted into personalized ingredient and formulation recommendations which can then be manufactured as customized liquid or powder products on site in under four minutes. The platform supports more than 25,000 formulation variations and enables clinics, med spas, retailers, and beauty brands to provide personalized products through one continuous workflow.
- Spacemap
- AI-based space situational awareness and space traffic management solutions for satellite constellations, including collision risk assessment, collision avoidance planning, and RF interference analysis. Product services are available through SaaS, API, and on-premise deployment models.
- StudioLab
- GENCY is an end-to-end AI platform designed to automate e-commerce content production for fashion and beauty brands, replacing traditional, fragmented workflows of studio photography, manual editing, copywriting, and layout assembly.
- Zezedu
- CherryPot is an AI-powered process assessment and personalized learning platform for mathematics and STEM education. Designed to evaluate how students think rather than just their final answers, CherryPot evaluates handwritten problem-solving line by line – on paper or tablet – to pinpoint exact logical breakdowns and award rubric-based partial credit with step-level feedback.