Seoul City Selects ‘Campus Town Project’, Gwanak-gu and Seoul National University Receive 4.5 Billion Won

2023 Seoul National University Campustown Demo Day scene (Photo by Gwanak-gu)

Gwanak-gu, Seoul (Mayor Park Jun-hee) has been finally selected in the ‘2024 Seoul Campus Town Project’ competition, jointly applied with Seoul National University, and will receive up to 4.5 billion KRW in project funding from Seoul City over three years. The ‘Campus Town Project’ aims to create youth jobs by discovering and nurturing prospective and early-stage startups, and to enhance regional vitality through cooperation between autonomous districts by utilizing the human and material resources of universities.

Gwanak-gu announced on the 7th that Seoul National University proposed a project to foster global deep tech innovation companies leading ‘Seoul as a Global Top 5 Startup City’ in this competition involving 12 major universities in Seoul, achieving the honor of being selected for the second consecutive time since 2020.

In addition to the secured 4.5 billion KRW from this selection, the district plans to push forward ‘Seoul National University Campus Town 2.0’ by additionally investing district budgets and Seoul National University development funds, and vigorously work towards achieving various goals (▲ securing 20 global collaboration partners ▲ attracting 120 billion KRW in global deep tech investments ▲ nurturing 60 global deep tech growth companies ▲ 4,000 participants in regional revitalization programs).

Meanwhile, since promoting the ‘Seoul National University OSCAR Gwanak Campus Town’ project in 2020, Gwanak-gu and Seoul National University have established five startup infrastructures and nurtured 73 companies to date.

Thanks to various supports from the district and Seoul National University, these companies have achieved a cumulative investment attraction amount of 104.7 billion KRW and sales of 18.3 billion KRW so far, and have demonstrated excellent results in various fields such as licensing contracts with IBM USA and attracting overseas investments worth 21 billion KRW (Cryptolab), establishing a corporation at UCLA Medical Center in the USA (Genialogy), selection for the Amazon AWS Startup Program (AnyAI), and winning the CES 2022 Best Innovation Award (Petnow).

Mayor Park Jun-hee expressed his ambition, saying, “Just as the 6,000 startups founded by Stanford University alumni created today’s Silicon Valley, Gwanak-gu will join forces with Seoul National University to make Gwanak-gu the Silicon Valley of Korea.”

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