42Maru

42Maru is a South Korean artificial intelligence company established in October 2015 by D.K. Donghwan Kim, Leo Hyunok Kim, and Jerry Wootae Jeong. The founders, including CEO D.K. Donghwan Kim, possess extensive experience in the search engine industry, having previously worked at Empas and SK Communications, where they contributed to a search engine that surpassed Google's market share in Korea. This background in search technology forms the bedrock of 42Maru's specialized focus.

The company operates on a business-to-business (B2B) model, providing AI-driven solutions primarily through subscriptions and contracts. Its core offering is a Deep Semantic Question Answering (QA) platform designed to understand the intent behind a user's question and extract a single, precise answer from vast amounts of unstructured data. This contrasts with conventional search engines that return a list of multiple potential answers. The technology leverages machine reading comprehension (MRC), natural language understanding (NLU), and deep learning to deliver accurate results, which helps to reduce the 'hallucination phenomenon' often associated with large language models. 42Maru serves a diverse range of enterprise clients in sectors including finance, manufacturing, and consumer electronics.

42Maru's product suite includes cognitive search, AI-based chatbots, and document analysis tools. Specific applications include knowledge management systems for call centers, internal employee help-desk chatbots, and conversational AI for financial services. The company has developed solutions for major corporations like Kia for an in-car voice assistant, Daewoo Shipbuilding & Marine Engineering for technical inquiries, and LG U+ for smart devices. A key product is LLM42, a lightweight large language model optimized for industrial fields, which can be deployed in a private mode to ensure data security for enterprise clients. This model, combined with their RAG42 (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) and MRC42 technologies, enhances accuracy. The company has received multiple rounds of funding, including a Series B round, from investors such as the Korean Development Bank, LG U+, and Naver Cloud, totaling over $9.27 million.

Keywords: Question Answering, Natural Language Processing, cognitive search, enterprise AI, deep learning, machine reading comprehension, AI chatbot, unstructured data analysis, semantic search, knowledge management, conversational AI, large language models, B2B AI solutions, document comparison, text analytics, data intelligence, financial AI, manufacturing AI, voice assistant technology, retrieval-augmented generation