“What matters more than a unicorn’s glamorous present is its growth pattern during the first one to seven years after founding. By tracing back the successful trajectories that companies such as Toss and Coupang followed in their early stages, we can use data to precisely identify which of the many promising startups taking their first steps could become the next unicorn.”
Park Jae Joon, CEO of Antock, recently described the essence of the company’s proprietary AI-powered success-path prediction algorithm, “Victory Road,” in an interview with Unicorn Factory, the startup media platform of MoneyToday.
A leading example of how the Victory Road model has been tailored to the real-world financial sector is “NH Radar.” Through NH Open Business Hub, an innovation startup acceleration program operated by NH NongHyup Bank, Antock has partnered with the bank’s AI Transformation (AX) Strategy Division to develop a prototype of NH Radar, a platform designed to analyze Korea’s fintech ecosystem. The project, launched in May, is currently in its final stages of development ahead of its official demonstration scheduled for November.
NH Radar is a platform that collects and analyzes the digital data of more than 3,000 fintech startups in Korea in real time to predict their growth potential. Rather than limiting fintech to specific technologies, Antock has expanded the scope to include startups that have participated in startup support and development programs operated by financial institutions and public organizations. The company conducted a comprehensive survey of 20 major support programs in Korea, including 10 commercial banks, five non-bank financial institutions such as Kyobo and Samsung Financial Group, and five public institutions, and visualized the results as a network map. Traditional financial fintech companies are positioned within the central circle, while non-financial convergence fintech companies are placed outside the circle, allowing users to understand the overall landscape of the ecosystem at a glance.
The platform also features a comparison function that enables users to evaluate the actual performance of each startup acceleration program based on data. It analyzes not only the survival rates of companies supported by each institution, their IPO and M&A success rates, and investment attraction records, but also their contribution to balanced regional investment aimed at fostering promising startups outside the Seoul metropolitan area.
One of the platform’s most important capabilities is automated technology matching tailored to NH-affiliated companies and internal departments. When a department enters specific fintech technology keywords relevant to its business needs, the Victory Road engine identifies and connects it in real time with startups among more than 3,000 companies that demonstrate the highest levels of technological fit and growth potential.
“Each institution or department has a completely different definition of what constitutes ‘success,’” Park explained. “For example, a lending division may regard a stable company with low risk and gradual revenue growth as successful, while an open innovation division may consider a technology startup capable of creating synergies with its own business to be the ideal success case.”
He added, “Victory Road has been precisely trained to understand the success criteria from the perspective of collaboration pursued by NH NongHyup Bank. It is designed to enable internal teams to immediately identify the optimal technology partners without having to search through startups themselves.”
The underlying principle of Victory Road is tracing back the DNA of success. The algorithm analyzes more than 300 types of activity data—including 10 years of early-stage data from proven leading companies, such as patent activity, R&D investment intensity, development of breakthrough technologies, wage growth rates, and hiring trends—to derive common growth patterns and equations. Based on these findings, the system continuously compares the results against a list of 30,000 startups selected from a sample of two million Korean companies, identifying companies with the highest potential for high growth. Based on the diagnostic results, the platform also provides a one-to-one recommendation feature that calculates which government support programs or financial products would be the best fit to help each company scale.
Antock’s Victory Road has already been adopted as a core engine of “Future Growth Model,” the next-generation system of IBK Industrial Bank of Korea. It has also been integrated into “TIPS MRI,” a startup diagnostic tool developed for TIPS companies by the Korea Business Angels Association and the Korea Institute of Startup & Entrepreneurship Development. Through these applications, the algorithm has demonstrated its effectiveness in both the public and financial sectors.
Building on this technological credibility, Antock plans to transform its business model by the end of the year. Moving away from its existing on-premise model, in which its solutions are directly built into and customized for large institutions, Antock plans to officially launch a standardized cloud-based SaaS (Software as a Service) solution within the year.
The introduction of the SaaS model is expected to significantly reduce service costs. Not only large commercial banks but also credit card companies, securities firms, and asset management companies—as well as venture capital firms (VCs), accelerators (ACs), and local governments that have traditionally faced budget constraints—will be able to subscribe to and easily access a high-performance AI-powered business diagnostic and scouting engine.
Antock is also accelerating its global expansion. The company has been collecting local corporate data in Asia through its Singapore subsidiary, established in November last year. From November 18–19, Antock will make its first appearance at the Singapore FinTech Festival (SFF), one of the world’s largest fintech events, with its own independent booth rather than participating as part of a joint pavilion. Through this event, Antock plans to officially unveil a prototype of Victory Road International, designed for the global market, to investors and financial institutions from around the world.
“In the past, the SI model, in which we directly built systems for clients, was costly for customers and labor-intensive for the company,” Park said. “Going forward, we aim to establish a mutually beneficial business model through a standardized cloud-based SaaS solution and accelerate our expansion into overseas markets, beginning with the Singapore FinTech Festival in November.”
[MoneyToday Startup Media Platform, Unicorn Factory]
