SparkLabs Korea, Asia’s leading startup accelerator and early-stage investor in South Korea, has launched a new venture capital fund, SparkLabs DeepTech. The first close of the fund was $15 million that will focus on seed and series A stage companies in South Korea.
SparkLabs Korea defines “deeptech” to include artificial intelligence, biotech, spacetech, smart cities, AR/VR, quantum computing, and advanced materials. The fund is led by Eugene Kim, a Managing Partner at SparkLabs Korea. Also Daniel Kim, a Director of Engineering at Meta (formerly Facebook), joins this fund as a Venture Partner.
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Daniel is an Engineering Director at Meta (formerly Facebook), which he joined in early 2007 as employee within the first 225 hires, and is currently the 11th most tenured employee. Most recently, Daniel was the lead for NPE (New Product Experimentation) Korea, which is Meta’s in-house incubator and a key part of their global expansion strategy.
Prior to this role, he led engineering teams at Oculus, where his teams were in charge of things such as Horizon Home, Guardian, Anytime UI, and others. At Instagram, Daniel founded and led their growth engineering team, which was directly accountable for Instagram’s user growth from 170 million to 1.1 billion MAU (monthly active users) in under five years. As an engineer, Daniel was a founding member of Facebook’s Android team and helped to usher Facebook’s pivot to mobile in 2010.
“I’m excited that Daniel has joined SparkLabs Korea as a Venture Partner for this new fund and our accelerator fund. His experience and knowledge from the early days of Facebook is incredibly relevant and transferable to our founders. He will have such an impact throughout our portfolio, so we will value any time that he can provide as our new Venture Partner,” said Eugene Kim, Managing Partner at SparkLabs Korea and SparkLabs Group
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