Three Startups from Hyundai Motor Group's Zero1 Spin Off

Hyundai Motor Group announced on Thursday (11th) that it has spun off three promising in-house startups. The companies in question are Positive Flow, WhereB, and JARBIS, which have been nurtured over the past year through the group’s in-house startup incubation programme, ‘Zero One Company Builder’.

Positive Flow is developing a smart mattress system designed to provide an optimal sleep environment. An artificial intelligence (AI) sensor attached to the mattress detects the user's sleep state and then automatically adjusts the temperature and humidity to promote restful sleep. For example, during hot and humid summer months, it activates a fan to lower the mattress's own temperature and humidity.

It also boasts excellent connectivity with smartphones. Users can check sleep data collected by the mattress via a mobile application, and can also control the temperature and humidity through the app. Recently, the company has been discussing potential collaboration with Hyundai Engineering & Construction in the field of 'Sleep Technology'. Sleep technology is a newly coined term referring to various products or services that utilise cutting-edge technology to improve sleep quality, and it is currently attracting significant attention.

WhereB is developing industrial safety technology based on high-precision location sensors. The system involves attaching sensors to workers' equipment, such as safety helmets and vests, as well as to industrial vehicles like automated guided vehicles (AGVs) and trucks, enabling them to exchange UWB (Ultra-Wide Band) [1] signals bidirectionally. The company has also developed a method to link workers' smartphones with industrial vehicles without the need for separate sensor equipment. [1: UWB uses ultra-wideband radio waves in the gigahertz (GHz) range, resulting in less interference with other radio waves. Due to this characteristic, it enables more accurate location positioning compared to Bluetooth or Near Field Communication (NFC).]

WhereB's business objective is to prevent collision accidents in the workplace by tracking the location of people and vehicles within a margin of error of less than 10 cm. Since last year, the company has been conducting demonstration projects both internally and externally to advance its technology. A notable example is a project on the production line at Kia's Hwaseong PBV Conversion Centre, where it is preventing collisions between forklifts and workers.

JARBIS is a startup in the automotive software (SW) sector. In the automotive industry, it has been common for errors to occur due to requirements being written in non-standardised ways during SW development, or due to manual coding. To address these issues, JARBIS provides standard tools and coding automation programmes necessary for developing automotive SW.

The SW technology held by JARBIS is expected to be highly useful for automotive parts suppliers struggling with the transition to Software-Defined Vehicles (SDVs). Recently, the company has conducted demonstration projects for developing SW for electronic control units (ECUs) with Hyundai Motor and Kia partners, including DH Lighting, Pyung Hwa Industrial, and Keyang Electric.

With the spin-off of these three companies, the total number of in-house startups that have become independent from Hyundai Motor Group has increased to 44. The group began identifying in-house startups in 2000 with the 'Venture Plaza' initiative, and from 2021, it expanded and reorganised the employee startup incubation programme under the name 'Zero One Company Builder'.

Startups selected by Zero One Company Builder receive up to 300 million won in development funding. After a one-year period for product/service development and commercialisation, a decision is made jointly with the company on whether to spin off as an independent entity or commercialise the project internally. To alleviate the burden on new founders, the programme also allows them to rejoin the company within three years of the spin-off.