The education market is experiencing rapid growth, driven by online education and EdTech companies that are revolutionizing how we teach and learn. These companies need high-quality content to power their services, and demand keeps rising. At the same time, classrooms are going digital at an unprecedented pace, with personalized learning becoming the norm. This digital transformation has created an urgent need for diverse educational content.

However, a critical problem persists beneath this booming market. Despite growing demand, educational content remains hard to access for the people who need it most. Content is frequently used or traded without proper rights. Educational materials often go through many transformations—from textbooks to worksheets for personalized education—but there’s still no legitimate and effective system to manage these changes.

The result? Nearly 20 million educational materials created in classrooms every year remain underutilized, held back by outdated licensing processes, unregulated marketplaces, and missing content technologies like tools to track, manage, and protect content.

Enter Solvook, a startup that has developed what they call an “end-to-end content ecosystem.” Their platform seamlessly connects licensing and distribution of educational content, enabling educators to license and use content easily while trading their new creations in a legitimate marketplace—all without the risk of infringement. Behind their platform runs proprietary apps with DRM and patented AI for content analysis and management.

Since launching as a licensing service in 2022, Solvook has achieved remarkable growth. Their initial 20-30 source materials have expanded to over 8,000 educational resources. With cumulative visitors reaching 400,000—80% of whom are academy instructors—and publishers on their platform earning more than 30 million dollars, Solvook is positioning itself to capture significant share of the global education market valued at over 350 billion dollars.

Solvook is currently participating in the 2025 Tourism Global Challenge program, organized by the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism and Korea Tourism Organization, and operated by CNTTech. Through this program, the company has gained valuable opportunities to introduce their vision and products to local partners and VCs in Vietnam, Japan, and the United States, providing crucial support for their global expansion strategy.

We sat down with Solvook’s leadership to learn more about their journey and vision for transforming the educational content industry.

The education market is growing rapidly. What specific problem are you trying to solve?

The education market is growing, led by online education and EdTech companies focusing on new ways to teach and learn. These companies need high-quality content to power their services, so the demand keeps rising.

At the same time, classrooms are going digital very fast. Personalized learning for each student is becoming the norm. This, again, increases the need for diverse educational content.

However, even with this growing demand, educational content is still hard to access for the people who need it. Many times, it is used or traded without proper rights.

Educational content often goes through many transformations—from textbooks to worksheets for personalized education. But there is still no legitimate and effective system to manage these transformations.

As a result, nearly 20 million educational materials created in classrooms every year remain underutilized—specifically because of outdated licensing processes, unregulated marketplaces, and missing content technologies like tools to track, manage, and protect content.

How does Solvook solve this problem?

Solvook is a seamless platform that connects licensing and distribution of educational content. We proudly call it an end-to-end content ecosystem.

Through our platform, educators can license and use content easily, and then trade their new creations in our marketplace—all without the risk of infringement. As our name and slogan goes, we at Solvook solve the problem and make educational content be used better.

Behind this, we run proprietary apps with DRM and patented AI for content analysis and management. And as educators use and create content on Solvook, our database of educational materials keeps expanding.

What makes Solvook different from competitors? What are your technical advantages?

If we divide the industry broadly into licensing, supplementary materials trading, and textbook publishing and distribution, most companies have been around for 20-30 years and still operate primarily with physical books. There’s huge room for innovation.

Unlike these services that are scattered across different sectors, our clearest differentiation is that we’ve integrated everything—from copyright mediation to registration, production, distribution, and classroom solutions—into one unified platform and solution.

Particularly through our open platform structure, we serve as the foundation for small independent content producers in the education industry. This gives us much greater potential for sustainability and scalability compared to existing corporate textbook producers like publishers and supplementary materials services that maintain closed structures. This potential positions us as the only alternative capable of infinitely supplying the high-quality educational content that the digital education era demands.

We also have technical differentiation. We focus on educational content analysis technology and reliable content generation. Unlike existing education industry technologies that mainly emphasize analyzing student behavioral indicators, we provide valuable analysis focused on the content itself.

Furthermore, in an education industry actively adopting generative AI, our focus on ensuring the reliability of generated content is another important technical differentiation.

We call it Solvook’s three major education innovations through AI technology application: first, innovation in digitization and labeling for educational content DX that utilizes AI 200%; second, innovation in professional educational content production that mixes AI with content experts; and third, innovation in customized, personalized learning through AI.

What products and services does Solvook provide? What’s your current status?

We started as a licensing service in 2022. In 2023, we launched our content marketplace. And in 2024, we introduced an integrated editing app called Solvook Expert—powered by our own content AI.

Solvook is rapidly growing as a platform encompassing the entire process—from creation to production to consumption. We’re establishing ourselves in the market by newly defining the production, discovery, and consumption ecosystem for learning content in the digital era.

From a user perspective, we’ve achieved instructor-centered expansion. Among our approximately 400,000 cumulative visitors, 80% are academy instructors. Considering the domestic high school academy instructor population of about 1 million, we estimate that 1 in 3 instructors recognizes Solvook. Among members, 1 in 2 total members and 1 in 10 instructors have purchase experience—that’s about 50,000 people cumulatively.

We’re also gradually expanding to top-tier high school students—roughly the top 3-5%—and parents. Common perceptions include “all academy teachers use it” or “the top student in our class uses it.” We estimate about 20,000 high school seniors are currently key users.

From a content perspective, our initial 20-30 source materials have now expanded to about 8,000 works, including English and Korean reference books, textbooks, and literary works. Based on this, purchases of copyrighted works through our platform have exceeded 10,000 transactions.

In just the first half of 2025, 30,000 legitimate digital textbooks were created through Solvook—that’s about four times the total number of new reference books published in Korea in an entire year.

Cumulative purchases and usage of these digital works have reached about 2 million transactions, with usage reaching about 23 million times.

Who are your target customers and how large is your target market?

Our work can be simply put as this: First, we transformed outdated licensing contracts into streamlined, platform-based transactions. Second, we turned unauthorized content trade into a formal, licensed market.

Therefore, our target includes all stakeholders in the education industry—those who create, use, or distribute content.

In fact, publishers on our platform have earned more than 30 million dollars by now. And content users completed more than 160,000 transactions.

Eventually, we are aiming at the global education market—already valued at over 350 billion dollars. This is because, as educational content becomes central to the future of education, our vision expands beyond content—to the entire education market.

But for now, we stay focused on our current target: the digital educational content market, valued at about 1 trillion KRW or roughly 800 million dollars.

What’s your business model?

As a copyright distribution platform, Solvook connects original creators, secondary creators, and consumers, securing 20-40% revenue from the mediation and distribution process.

Our revenue model consists of: copyright license sales, where we connect IP owners and educational content producers and secure 20% of transaction revenue as commission fees; educational content product sales based on original content, where we share revenue with original and secondary creators and secure 20~40% as revenue; and original content, where we share revenue with creators and secure 40~60% as revenue.

What have been your team’s key achievements so far?

Our journey has three milestones, I could say: first, gaining attention with our first-to-market business model. Second, strengthening our foundation by improving user convenience. And third, building assets for sustainable growth through our platform users and content database.

We are a company that makes educational content be used better. To realize this well, we provide comprehensive services from licensing to content usage and trading, and we’re putting all our efforts into supplying high-quality educational content needed for the AI digital textbook era that will fully open next year.

By last year, we completed three investment rounds, and we’re building a legitimate content trading market together with nine investment partners including KB Investment, Primer Sazeh Partners, BluePoint, JB, BeHigh, SL, and SBA.

What makes your team competitive?

Behind all of this is a capable team building this vision together. Our team is led by two co-CEOs. Together, they combine domain expertise and scale-up capability, and all members have strong backgrounds in content, technology, and business development.

First, let me start with myself. My strength is my EdTech career. Particularly, at STUnitas, I played an overall leadership role for Academy Cloud, a platform that serves both academy and private tutoring instructors. While growing that business, I traveled extensively to key educational districts and identified the market problem of textbook copyright, which led me to start this business.

After completing the initial setup, to accelerate growth, we brought in Kim Kwan-baek, who was a registered director and overall platform manager at STUnitas, creating our co-CEO structure. This shows how seriously we want to capitalize on the next-stage opportunities through platform growth.

As a company that values content technology, we work together with team members who can contribute to AI and solutions, especially those who can contribute to content technology.

What efforts are you making for global expansion, and what results have you seen?

Global expansion is not optional, as the market opportunity for licensed educational content is already clear.

In particular, we see strong cross-border demand, driven by a growing study-abroad market which is in need of authorized test materials. Solvook is best positioned to serve this need.

Strategically, we begin with Korean language test materials, targeting Asian countries with rising demand to learn the language. We have already taken the first step in Vietnam this year, launching edu-tour programs to build partnerships with its local education sector.

We will scale this model across Asia.

How is the 2025 Tourism Global Challenge program helping with your global expansion?

It provides opportunities to introduce our company’s vision and products to local partners and VCs in Vietnam, Japan, and the United States.

Give us three reasons why investors should invest in Solvook.

First, we’re distributing educational content for all subjects targeting domestic middle and high school students, generating monthly revenues at the level of 500 million to 1 billion KRW. We have 120,000 teachers and students using our platform domestically. Beyond Korea, we’re now expanding to Vietnamese and Japanese students with official textbook distribution for study abroad exams like Korean language tests. We’ve completed market research by country and are currently conducting PoC.

Second, in the generative AI era, we’re creating an educational content creator ecosystem that produces and sells high-quality educational content through collaboration between human authors and AI. Solvook is the only platform providing all-in-one services from production to sales both domestically and internationally.

Third, our business is developed by two co-CEOs and an elite team optimized for educational platforms, core educational content, and digital textbook usage and trading technologies.