Motif Technologies Raises $16.6M Series B to Advance Korea’s Homegrown AI Foundation Model

Motif Technologies, a South Korean AI company building large-scale foundation models from the ground up, has closed an approximately USD 16.6M(KRW 24 billion) Series B funding round. Returning investors NICE Investment Partners and Nautilus Investment participated as follow-on backers, while Ditto Investment and Forest Ventures joined as new investors.

The company has gained recognition for its commitment to building AI foundation models entirely from its own architecture — without borrowing from foreign open-source model designs. This approach earned Motif Technologies a spot in February as one of the elite teams selected for the Ministry of Science and ICT’s “Indigenous AI Foundation Model” program. Under the initiative, the company is now co-developing a 300B-parameter reasoning-focused large language model (LLM) alongside 17 partner organizations, including Moreé, Seoul National University, KAIST, Samil PricewaterhouseCoopers, the National Heritage Promotion Agency, and HDC Labs.

The roadmap calls for the LLM to evolve progressively into a 310B-parameter vision-language model (VLM) and ultimately a 320B-parameter vision-language-action (VLA) model — positioning Motif Technologies to compete at the global frontier of AI foundation model development.

The company plans to deploy the proceeds toward enterprise AI transformation (AX) solutions and next-generation AI infrastructure and services.

“This investment will serve as a springboard for strengthening Motif’s deep AI capabilities,” said CEO Jeonghwan Lim. “We will push forward with our enterprise AX solutions, next-generation AI infrastructure, and service development as planned to sharpen our competitive edge in the market.”