19 of the hottest South Korean startups came to Tokyo looking for business partners – here’s our top five favorites

Startup Alliance Korea is a bold public-private initiative committed to supporting South Korean startups domestically and assisting their international expansion. Business leaders like Naver, Daum and Kakao have teamed up with the South Korean government to provide a co-working space, networking opportunities, and conferences. This week, the one-year old Startup Alliance came to Tokyo in order to drum up international support for 19 featured startups.

The “Japan Bootcamp” features a host of meetings with major corporations like Line, Yahoo Japan, Google Japan, and advertising giant Dentsu. On Wednesday, Open Network Labs sponsored a Korean Startup Demo Day event. All 19 startups made pitches. Check out Tech in Asia’s favorite five below.

1. Textat

If you have ever met a nice guy or gal and, after a few weeks of text messaging, are not sure if their latest invitation to movie night means you are living in the friendzone or cruising down Highway Greenlight to the Hotel of Love, this is the app for you. Having analyzed 1.2 billion text messages (including stickers and emoticons), the Textat team is confident that their system can accurately predict the emotional patterns underlying the conversation. Users answer a few background questions and then upload a thread of messages into the Textat system to find out if they can add “benefits” to their friend-status.

2. Vingle

Vingle is a content sharing social network service that has over 3,000 channels and is still growing. Founder Jiwon Moon learned about the power of fans when she co-founded Viki. With Viki, fans of television shows and movies provide their subtitling expertise for free. With Vingle, Moon gives those fans an outlet to share content related to the interests they are passionate about. Vingle was perhaps the most robust startup to take the stage, having already grown to 2.5 million monthly unique visitors and 10 100 million monthly pageviews. The service has gained popularity in the United States and Korea, but Moon told the audience that Japan is a key market it wishes to reach.

3. Bapul

Bapul is an education application that harnesses the geniuses of the world to educate those of us with more modest intellects. The app is designed to be used for math problems. A student working through a tough question can take a picture using a smartphone or tablet and then write out their approach to solving the problem. Within 20 minutes, a response should come through with the correct answer and explanation.

Japan, like South Korea, is well known for putting students through an intense studying regimen on their way to college. The Japanese market is flush with education apps like Mana.bo and Studypact but the sheer simplicity of Bapul could give the Korean product some traction.

See: South Korea’s 10 most valuable tech startups,

4. 500videos

5. Blind