[Pangyo Startup] Space Bank, from Space-Sharing to "Bot Store" based on AI

    LOS ANGELES, CA, July 21, 2021 /24-7PressRelease/ -- When we are outside spending some time by ourselves or hanging out with friends, we have to pay for staying in a place like café, karaoke room or restaurant. Places for work such as offices and meeting rooms also need to be paid. While we need many spaces for every reason these days, you can often spot places that are used by no one. The same goes for Seoul, one of the most expensive cities in Asia.

Space Bank (CEO: Wonhee Lee) began its business in sharing economy to solve problems of imbalance between supply and demand of spaces. It started with Prop Tech service where individuals can sell and buy places. Now, the company is expanding its business. It launched 8Y8(8uild your 8rand), an AI-based immersive marketing platform and RAIID, an AI RPA service connecting dots in AI and real-estate fields

We met Space Bank CEO Wonhee Lee at Startup Campus in Pangyo, South Korea

Q1. Tell us about your company

Wonhee Lee: We began our business with a space-sharing platform Space Bank and became a prop-tech service provider based on AI, big data and RPA technologies. Now, we are running three platforms. Space Bank, 8Y8(Vive) and RAIID.

Space bank is launched in 2018. Ever since then, we have been engaged in platform and O2O business. With an aim to secure 5,000 space data by 2021, we have collected and registered various spaces and are using those spaces to develop a space-curating service.

Q2. What makes Space Bank special?

Wonhee Lee: Anyone can become a host by registering their idle spaces on our platform without having to register their proprietorship. The biggest factor that makes us like no other is that we adopted AI, big data and RPA based tech-brand service into prop-tech business.

Moreover, our AI technology is highly compatible with other platforms. We believe collaboration is important and one of the ways of ramping up such cooperation is developing a solution that can be adopted for many technologies and companies.

Q3. What made you start this business?

Wonhee Lee: I got first-hand experience of the rapid changing IT industry while working for LG CNS for 15 years. I wanted to run my business with my own know-hows and expertise that I had accumulated. I decided to jump in platform business as I developed and built some services and platforms at LG CNS.

Q4. What have you achieved so far?
Wonhee Lee: We began in 2018. The space-sharing service, Space Bank was established in the next year and it was followed by the AI-based immersive marketing platform 8Y8. We raised seed funding last year as well. Now we're preparing for the next fund-raise.

We were chosen for the "2021 AI Voucher Support Program" which is being carried out by Ministry of Science and ICT and National IT Industry Promotion Agency in February. The two agencies acknowledged our AI service brand RAIID for its competitive integrated AI data-driven business service that offers many benefits such as RPA solution, task automation, data analysis and data visualization.

Q5. What is your future plan?
Wonhee Lee: We plan to launch a bot store where anyone can adopt RPA software to robots. You can easily find such an automatizing service in e-commerce and smart-farm sectors. Now, we are designing an RPA software-based platform that helps businesses with robotic process automation.

AI automation technology in the platform will enable users to use robot far easier. We believe the platform with a new concept will produce valuable opportunities.

Q6. What about your plan for going abroad?

We are ready to expand our RPA-driven data business based on the partnership with BATEM, a local RPA solution company. We are currently developing the bot store project but it won't drag us down. Rather it is expected to speed up our way to enter overseas market as the project is being carried out with a cloud service which frees us from the limit of time and space.

I prefer Singapore as the first foreign market for us. The country has a lower entry barrier as it requires all companies to work with standardized model. The same goes for language barrier as English and Chinese are commonly spoken in the country.

Q8. What made you work in Pangyo?
Like people do, businesses have to compete with one another. The competition is particularly fierce among businesses in the same field. But you can learn many things from competitors. Pangyo is home to many young and ambitious businesses where you can easily contact many companies. I found communication is particularly important for businesses in the field of AI. So I built a community of AI businesses, AI Alliance. The community has helped us to build closer collaborative relations which is more than just a network. If it were not for Pangyo, it would have been much harder to build such a community with other companies.

Space Bank is based in Pangyo. Pangyo Technovalley is an innovation hub for global companies comparable to the Silicon Valley in the US, Zhongguancun in China, and STATION F in France. It is an Asia tech hub with 1,259 IT, BT, CT, and NT companies that possess innovative products and technologies. Located just south of the metropolitan area, it provides the best environment for Korean companies to do business with great transportation access and infrastructure.

Various high-tech companies are located in Pangyo Technovalley, and it is occupied by 64,000 full-time employees, many in their 20-30s. In terms of industry, the companies are engaged in information technology, contents technology, biotechnology, and nanotechnology.

With the support of innovative companies with global capabilities such as Kakao, Naver, AhnLab, Krafton, NCSoft, Nexon, and Hancom, companies in Pangyo Technovalley recorded 107 trillion won in sales last year. Investment and infrastructure growth in Pangyo is expected to continue, with the Metaverse hub entering Pangyo this year.

Pangyo TechnoValley News Room

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