The Ministry of SMEs and Startups will launch across-the-board support for promising AI startups to nurture one AI decacorn and 20 unicorns by 2030.
The Ministry of SMEs and Startups (MSS) said it unveiled the “AI Startup Beyond Unicorn Growth Strategy,” prepared jointly with the Presidential Committee on AI, on the 11th at Deep Dive Into 2026, the country’s largest deep-tech startup technology forum.
The strategy goes beyond simply finding promising AI startups and focuses on strengthening step-by-step support—from discovery to commercialization, investment, and overseas expansion—so they can grow into companies competitive in global markets.
Positioning “Realizing a top-three AI power and a startup nation by fostering AI Beyond Unicorns” as its vision, the Ministry of SMEs and Startups (MSS) laid out three strategies—with 12 detailed tasks: full life-cycle support from discovery to leap, accelerating innovative growth, and boosting a global market leap.
First, government, academia, research circles, and the private sector will work together to identify “early AI unicorns” with unicorn-level growth potential and select promising firms based on investment, hiring outcomes, and other metrics. Selected companies will receive performance targets to strengthen commercialization capabilities, and those that advance through the final stage will be eligible for more than 10 billion won per company in research and development (R&D) and commercialization funding.
The government will also establish a control tower for fostering AI unicorns together with the Presidential Committee on AI to set policy, and it will form a consortium of startups, large companies, investors, and others to drive results through collaboration.
To accelerate AI startups’ growth, the government will supply AI funds tailored to each growth stage and build an integrated testbed that links semiconductors, cloud, large language models (LLMs), and services. It will help apply startup technologies to products of large corporations and demand-side companies so that adoption leads to purchases and sales channels, and it will expand “government first validation and purchase,” in which the government and public institutions serve as first customers, to the AI sector.
Support for entering global markets will also be strengthened. The government will push AI regulatory improvements and joint regulatory sandbox projects, and it will back overseas validation and market development by leveraging the infrastructure and technical capabilities of major companies at home and abroad. It will set up AI connectors by country to link technology transactions between global buyers and Korean startups and help secure AI professionals domestically and internationally.
Minister Lee So-young of the Ministry of SMEs and Startups (MSS) said, “For AI startups to grow into global unicorns, they need comprehensive support—not only technology development but also commercialization through technology validation, investment and market access, and overseas expansion,” adding, “Through this strategy, we will focus our support so that companies in Korea can grow beyond global AI unicorns to become decacorns.”