Bunkerkids Raises $9.7M Series A to Scale AI Character Chat Platform WHIF Across Asia

Bunkerkids, the Korean startup behind AI character chat platform WHIF, has raised $9.7 million (KRW 15 billion) in a Series A round, the company announced Sunday.

Kolon Investment, Kakao Ventures, Mirae Asset Capital, We Ventures, BSK Investment, Murex Investment, CRIT Ventures, and Samchully Investment participated in the round.

WHIF is an AI-powered interactive storytelling platform that allows users to develop relationships with AI characters and shape narratives through their conversational choices. Unlike simple Q&A chatbots, WHIF creates stories and relationships that evolve organically as conversations accumulate. The platform also enables users to create and share their own AI characters, transforming passive consumers into active creators of characters and narratives.

Bunkerkids was founded by CEO Seung-wan Jung, who previously exited two businesses, and assembled a lean team of engineers and product specialists from major Korean tech companies including Coupang and Toss. The team’s rapid decision-making and execution, combined with a sophisticated character and narrative system tuned to user preferences from launch, has driven strong engagement and revenue growth.

WHIF users demonstrate exceptionally high engagement, with paying users spending an average of 217 minutes per day on the platform—a reflection of the service’s ability to sustain long-form character relationships and evolving storylines. Payment volume has grown at a 110% monthly average rate over the nine months since launch, and monthly revenue has expanded 1,000-fold from the launch baseline within one year. WHIF currently ranks first by revenue in the Asian female-targeted AI character chat market.

The platform has also gained traction internationally. WHIF launched simultaneously in Japan, Taiwan, Thailand, and the United States in October 2025 and now operates in thirteen countries. Approximately 40% of total revenue currently comes from overseas markets, and the company aims to increase that share above 60% by year-end.

Bunkerkids previously raised $1.3 million from CRIT Ventures in July. At that time, the company also ran AI education service Data Diving and an AI-powered meal recommendation service, but with the new funding it plans to focus resources entirely on WHIF.

As generative AI technology advances, the global AI character chat market is expanding rapidly. Bunkerkids believes the sector will evolve beyond its current text-centric form into a multimodal content market integrating images and video. Characters could expand into webtoons, video, games, and other intellectual property formats, while user-generated character creation and storytelling become increasingly central to the ecosystem.

The Series A proceeds will support aggressive hiring across engineering, product, design, and marketing functions. The company also plans to refine product quality and accelerate global expansion. Development priorities include enhancing character depth and narrative fidelity, integrating multimodal image and video capabilities into the service, and localizing content and user experience for each market to sustain overseas growth momentum.

“Bunkerkids has proven its growth capacity through deep market understanding and rapid execution,” said Bo-young Kim, executive director at Kolon Investment. “We are particularly excited by the global expansion narrative WHIF will write as it realizes its vision as a next-generation content platform.”

“Bunkerkids is a lean organization that, despite launching in mid-2025 as a late mover, has outpaced established competitors with extraordinary metrics in just seven months,” said Dong-wook Jang, executive director at Kakao Ventures. “The team demonstrated exceptional capital efficiency from the outset and successfully locked in high-value female users through superior product execution. We expect Bunkerkids to emerge as a core Korean IP platform for the global AI-native era.”

“Just as online gaming evolved from text to graphics and video, the AI character chat market is reaching a new inflection point,” said CEO Seung-wan Jung. “When multimodal content combining images and video arrives, the market will expand beyond anything we see today. WHIF will be at the center of that transformation, creating entirely new content experiences.”

Investment activity among AI-powered content startups has accelerated in recent months. In June, game studio THE SMC raised $13 million in a pre-IPO round to scale its AI-powered creator marketing platform, while Mateo AI Studio secured $1.4 million in pre-Series A funding to expand its AI-native IP production technology.