The Plato, a South Korean company that provides the AI-powered real-time conversation recording and high-quality summary note service “Tiro,” announced on the 6th that it has secured a $600,000 (KRW 800 million) seed investment from Smilegate Investment and Mashup Ventures.  

Founded in 2024, The Plato was established by a team of Seoul National University alumni, including CEO Eunseong Lim, a serial entrepreneur with a background in mathematics and computer science and experience as an AI engineer; Director Sangcheol Kim, former frontend lead at Qanda; and Director Yuna Hong, who transitioned into venture capital after a successful startup exit.  

Tiro, developed by The Plato, is an AI-powered note-taking service that records multilingual conversations in real time and generates high-quality summary notes. It goes beyond simple transcription by automatically structuring conversations, understanding the context of user statements, and instantly creating one-page documents in the desired format. The service is widely used in business settings such as meetings, lectures, and interviews and has quickly gained paying customers among global startups and venture capital firms. Notably, Tiro has surpassed 15,000 users, generating annual revenue in the hundreds of thousands of dollars (several hundred million KRW) while maintaining a subscription renewal rate of over 90%.  

With this investment, The Plato aims to expand beyond real-time in-person meetings to support all platforms, including mobile, tablets, and desktops, transforming into an all-in-one AI assistant capable of recording all types of conversations. The company plans to allocate the entire investment toward enhancing service quality and customer value while making the platform more intuitive and accessible, even for users with limited AI experience. Additionally, it plans to drive wider adoption among organizations, particularly existing customers such as well-known VC firms and startups.  

Yujin Cho, Team Leader at Smilegate Investment, who led the investment round, stated, “We decided to invest in The Plato because they have been rapidly scaling with the vision of becoming a global AI SaaS company since their early days. After personally using Tiro for over three hours a day, I saw a significant improvement in the quality of my meetings. With Voice AI emerging as a new growth sector following the rise of LLMs, I believe The Plato has the potential to become the next unicorn.”  
Eunseong Lim, CEO of The Plato, shared his excitement, saying, “We’re thrilled to have secured investment from top-tier partners who believe in our potential. Our goal is to maximize our competitiveness in AI-driven applications that directly engage users and establish ourselves as the leading global product in the Voice AI space, following in the footsteps of Notion.”