“We cut the time it takes to design refrigerator and washing machine parts from two or three months to a few hours, and we are now analyzing 1.4 million metal blends with artificial intelligence to find next-generation materials.”
These are among the technologies Samsung Electronics (005930.KS) is developing with South Korean startups. Half of the 30 companies that joined the chipmaker’s startup incubation program, C-Lab Outside, this year — 15 in total — have begun jointly developing products and technologies with Samsung business divisions and research centers. The collaboration model is moving beyond funding and infrastructure support toward applying startup innovations directly to Samsung’s own businesses.
Samsung Electronics unveiled the results of those joint development efforts at the 2026 C-Lab Startup Demo Day, held on the 10th at its Seoul R&D Campus in Umyeon-dong, Seocho-gu, Seoul. Six startups presented their collaboration cases before an audience of about 400 venture investors and industry officials.
“The startups have put their heads together with Samsung engineers to solve challenging problems,” Park Seung-hee, president of corporate relations at Samsung Electronics, said in a welcoming address. “As a result, some startups proved outstanding technical capabilities and went on to attract investment from Samsung or become business partners.”
Samsung launched C-Lab Inside, an in-house venture incubation program, in 2012, then broadened its support in 2018 with C-Lab Outside, which identifies and nurtures external startups. Since the programs began, the company has carried out 434 in-house venture projects and supported 566 outside startups.
The Dimension Company, a C-Lab Outside participant, presented an AI design verification project under way with Samsung’s Digital Appliances division. The startup showed reverse-engineering technology that converts design documents for more than 10 types of components used in refrigerators and washing machines into programming code that AI can read and revise. “Part design work that took experts two to three months now takes a few hours with AI,” said Lee Re, chief executive of The Dimension Company. “We are also testing a function that changes the shape and dimensions of parts using code converted from the drawings.”
Another participant, NanoForge AI, is working with Samsung’s Production Technology Research Institute to find advanced metal materials that are lightweight and suited to mass production. Over three months starting in June, the company used AI to screen about 1.4 million metal blends and narrowed the field to 63 candidates. It then selected three final blends after weighing cost and processing conditions, and has tested them since September under conditions similar to actual mass production. The company is now considering publishing a paper and filing for patents based on the results.
Config Intelligence is jointly developing with Samsung a technology that converts footage of people at work into data that robots can learn from. Because robots have different joint structures from humans, they struggle to copy human movements directly. Config Intelligence uses AI to translate human motion into forms suited to robots, reducing the repetitive work needed to collect training data. Samsung said Config Intelligence is the only company among the eighth C-Lab Outside cohort in which it has invested directly.
The collaboration cases disclosed at the event emerged from the C-Lab Outside incubation process that preceded the demo day. Executives from Samsung business divisions took part in screening from the selection stage, examining which products or processes each startup’s technology could be applied to. After selection, C-Lab spent three to five months connecting the startups with Samsung divisions or research centers that could use their technology. Of this year’s 30 participants, 12 were nurtured at bases in Daegu, North Gyeongsang Province and Gwangju.
“A business partnership with Samsung works like a kind of technology certification mark,” said Park Nam-hyun, head of Samsung’s C-Lab team. “The simple fact that Samsung has validated a technology helps a startup a great deal in scaling up its business later.”
#SamsungElectronics#CLabOutside#StartupKorea#AIDesign#RoboticsAI#AdvancedMaterials
Original reporting by Lee Seok-jin for Seoul Economic Daily.
AI-translated from Korean. Quotes from foreign sources are based on Korean-language reports and may not reflect exact original wording.
View Korean originalTranslation Policy
Most Read This Week
- 1Nvidia CEO Admits Affair With Woman Suspected of Chinese Spying
- 2China’s Iconic Chili Sauce Maker Faces Boycott Over AI Job Cuts
- 3Japan to Urge Citizens to Stockpile Three Days of Food, Water
- 4Japan’s New Disaster Agency Urges Week of Food Stockpiles, Stirring War Fears
- 5U.K. and Japan Urge 3-Day Supplies; Experts Say Make It Two Weeks
