Aug 27, 2025
"Investment Is Hard to Come By" — Korea's Autonomous Driving Firms Find Their Own Way
[Autonomous Driving Loses Home Ground to China]
South Korea's autonomous driving companies are struggling on the funding front. Shut out of the large-scale investment rounds that their global peers can access, domestic players are scraping together their own revenue streams and plowing the proceeds back into R&D just to stay in the game.
The numbers tell the story. According to industry sources on the 27th, Waymo — the global frontrunner — has accumulated $11 billion in investment (roughly 15 trillion KRW). Motional, the US-based autonomous driving company backed by Hyundai Motor Group, has taken in $5 billion. Even Pony.ai, the Chinese firm currently running tests in South Korea, has raised at least $1.7 billion. The contrast with Korea is stark: Autonomous A2Z, the most well-funded domestic player, has raised just $60 million (approximately 82 billion KRW) in total — less than one percent of what Waymo has attracted.
In autonomous driving, financial endurance may matter as much as technology. A company has to survive long enough to see its technology through to full maturity. But Korea's capital market is smaller than those of the US or China, and investor appetite for deep-tech ventures is comparatively thin. Even technically capable companies find it structurally difficult to raise serious money at home.
Korean firms are responding by finding ways to generate their own revenue and reinvest it in autonomous driving development. SWM, for example, sells navigation software to automakers and channels those earnings into its robotaxi ambitions.
Others build their books through government service contracts — autonomous village buses, shuttle services, and the like. SUM is running autonomous shuttles near the Blue House for the Seoul Metropolitan Government, autonomous town buses in Dongjak-gu, and late-night and early-morning autonomous commuter services. Since this past July, it has also been operating the autonomous "Masil Bus" in the mountain communities of Gangneung, where conventional public transport barely reaches.
ACEWORKS takes a different route, supplying software verification solutions for EV control systems and Battery Management Systems (BMS) to automakers and using that revenue to fund its autonomous driving work. More recently, the company has added a defense dimension — supplying control system software for tank engines built by a major domestic defense manufacturer — further diversifying the contract base that keeps the company moving forward.
Source: Asia Business Daily, Reporter Su-yeon Woo yesim@asiae.co.kr
URL : https://www.asiae.co.kr/article/2025082616274856214