CJ Launches 6th Cohort of 'Obentus' to Discover Promising Startups

CJ announced on the 6th that it has begun recruiting participant companies for the 6th batch of the promising lifestyle startup accelerating program ‘O!VentUs (Open+Venture+Us)’.

Launched in 2019, O!VentUs is a program run in collaboration with the Seoul Creative Economy Innovation Center to discover and nurture startups with growth potential. Over four years, five rounds of the program have been conducted, selecting a total of 40 startups. The accelerating program included business capability enhancement training, commercialization funding, and support for follow-up investment attraction. As a result, it has achieved approximately 25 billion KRW in cumulative investment support and an average threefold increase in corporate value.

The recruitment period runs until the 4th of next month, and CJ plans to select up to 12 teams with innovative product or service items and high growth potential through document and presentation evaluations. Selected companies will receive management and business strategy consulting directly from Kim Do-han, CEO of CJ Investment, CJ Group’s CVC, over approximately four months starting in July. Additionally, essential education and mentoring in areas such as corporate diagnosis, technology analysis and patent diagnosis, finance, taxation, law, and IR will be provided.

CJ Connect Day, where CJ Investment and major CJ affiliates participate to explore investment and business linkage possibilities, will also be held. At the end of October, the ‘O!VentUs Demo Day’ will be hosted to showcase commercialization plans utilizing each company’s products and services based on the accelerating program conducted so far. Outstanding companies will receive up to 300 million KRW in commercialization funding linked with the Ministry of SMEs and Startups’ public-private cooperation open innovation support project.

The recruitment targets are startups within three years of establishment in the lifestyle sector, with a post-value (corporate value after investment) of around 5 billion KRW, in areas including ▲Food & Bio ▲Logistics & New Distribution ▲Entertainment & Media ▲Digital Transformation ▲and other new businesses proposed to CJ Group. Detailed recruitment schedules and participation qualifications can be checked on the O!VentUs website.

Kim Do-han, CEO of CJ Investment, said, “We are expanding open innovation to innovate the group’s business model and expand a healthy startup ecosystem,” adding, “We will actively support the early discovery and nurturing of promising startups so that they can settle in the market.”

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.