42 Maru

42 Maru is a South Korean artificial intelligence company established in 2015 by CEO Donghwan (D.K.) Kim and other search industry experts. The founding team, sometimes referred to as the “Search Mafia,” possesses over two decades of experience developing search engines that successfully competed with Google in the Korean market. This deep expertise in search technology forms the bedrock of the company's mission. Kim's background includes leading the search divisions at SK Communications and Empas, where he was responsible for search engine R&D, business strategy, and operations.

The company develops and offers a Deep Semantic Question Answering (QA) platform designed to understand the intent behind a user's question and deliver a single, precise answer from vast, unstructured datasets. This core technology addresses a significant business inefficiency: the considerable time employees spend searching for information. 42 Maru's platform utilizes a combination of advanced technologies, including machine reading comprehension (MRC), natural language understanding (NLU), and paraphrasing, to interpret queries and extract accurate information, thereby reducing the 'hallucination phenomenon' often associated with large language models. The business operates on a B2B model, primarily serving enterprise clients with solutions like cognitive search for knowledge management, conversational AI chatbots for customer service and internal help-desks, and document comparison tools. Its revenue is generated through a subscription-based model for access to its AI solutions.

Key products include QA42, an AI-based question-answering solution; CHAT 42, a conversational AI chatbot; and NL42, a natural language processing technology suite. These technologies have practical applications across various sectors, such as providing AI chatbots for financial institutions and offering document comprehension for engineering and shipbuilding firms like Daewoo Shipbuilding & Marine Engineering. A notable milestone includes co-ranking first with Google in the SQuAD 2.0 machine reading competition, a testament to its technical capabilities. The company has received multiple rounds of funding from investors including the Korean Development Bank, LG U+, and NAVER Cloud, and was the first Korean AI startup selected for the Techstars London accelerator program.

Keywords: Question Answering, Natural Language Understanding, NLU, Machine Reading Comprehension, MRC, cognitive search, enterprise AI, conversational AI, chatbots, deep learning, semantic search, text analytics, unstructured data, AI platform, Donghwan Kim, knowledge management, data intelligence, SaaS, enterprise software, financial services AI