Podonos, a Korean company specializing in voice AI analysis services, announced on the 28th that it has secured a pre-seed investment of approximately USD 750,000 (KRW 1 billion) from KAIST Venture Investment Holdings and U.S.-based Serac Ventures.

Founded in February last year, Podonos has developed technology that dramatically reduces the time required for analysis and data collection aimed at improving AI model performance. With this investment, the company plans to enhance its services and actively expand into new markets.

Traditionally, evaluating the performance of AI models across multiple global languages could take up to two months. Podonos, however, delivers analysis reports in less than 12 hours. This allows AI developers to significantly cut down on both time and cost, while also accelerating the pace at which their models improve.

Podonos’s voice AI analysis solution already supports multilingual evaluations, enabling global AI companies to test model performance in a wider range of environments with greater precision. Moving forward, the company plans to extend its services beyond voice to include video AI and large language model (LLM) evaluations. Podonos is expected to make a major contribution to enhancing AI agent performance and is poised to drive innovation across the broader AI evaluation space.

Junhyun Ahn, Director at KAIST Venture Investment, said, “Podonos’s solution tackles a core challenge in the voice AI analysis and evaluation space, an area that has traditionally been difficult to access. With its proprietary environment control and automated quality assessment technology, the company is well-positioned to compete globally, especially in the voice segment, which will become increasingly critical in the AI agent era.”

Suhyun Bae, CEO of Podonos, commented, “As AI technology continues to evolve, the ability to evaluate its performance and reliability is becoming more important than ever. This investment will not only allow us to refine our technology, but also to broaden our services across different AI domains, establishing Podonos as a competitive global player.” He added, “By offering efficient AI evaluation solutions, we aim to help developers and researchers focus more on advancing core technologies.”