AI optimization technology startup ENERZAi has successfully completed a bridge funding round, securing an additional 7.7 billion KRW and bringing its total funding to 12 billion KRW. New investors in this round include Korea Development Bank, K2 Investment Partners, and SBI Investment Korea. Existing investor Korea Investment Partners also participated with follow-on investment.

Founded in 2019, ENERZAi is pioneering AI innovation under the vision of “delivering the best AI experience on everything for everyone." The company addresses challenges such as reduced product competitiveness and increased costs caused by poor AI inference performance, through its proprietary AI inference optimization technology. With this technological edge, ENERZAi has formed partnerships with global semiconductor leaders such as Intel, Arm, NVIDIA, Qualcomm, and Renesas Electronics.

ENERZAi’s Optimium is a next-generation Ai inference engine that significantly accelerates AI inference on target hardware without sacrificing accuracy. Currently supporting inference optimization for CPUs, Optimium has demonstrated superior performance in terms of speed and efficiency compared to existing inference engines. This product has gained international recognition, and in April 2025, Optimium was selected as the winner of the Product of the Year Award in the Best Edge AI development platform category by the Edge AI and Vision Alliance.

Optimium empowers device manufacturers to significantly enhance Edge AI capabilities by improving speed and throughput. It also enables fabless semiconductor and IP companies to deliver greater AI performance to their clients. ENERZAi further combines low-bit and low memory AI models with highly optimized kernels powered by Optimium, enabling high performant an efficient AI execution even on resource-constrained edge devices.

Hyuckryul Kwon, Executive Director at K2 Investment Partners commented, “ENERZAi possesses unrivaled technological capabilities in AI inference optimization and is rapidly strengthening its market position through collaborations with global players. As AI adoption accelerates across diverse industries and increasingly complex new AI models emerge, ENERZAi’s technology has the potential to serve as foundational infrastructure.

ENERZAi plans to use this funding to expand Optimium’s support coverage and further enhance its performance. The company also aims to recruit top global talent to accelerate its international expansion.

Hyunwoo Jeong, CSO (Chief Strategy Officer) of ENERZAi, stated, “Despite the global economic slowdown and tightened investment climate for startups, we successfully attracted funding by demonstrating the growing need for AI inference optimization, the strength of our technology, and our potential for global scalability. With this investment, we aim to rapidly expand Optimium’s support range, broaden customer use cases, and solidify our global business foundation.”