Korea's open model lab
Trillion Labs was founded in Seoul in 2024 by CEO Jaemin Shin, a key research scientist behind Naver's HyperCLOVA X and formerly of SoftBank-backed edtech Riiid. Dubbed by Forbes as an aspiring 'OpenAI of Korea', the company came out of stealth with $4.2M in seed funding led by Strong Ventures, joined by Kakao Ventures, Bass Investment, BAM Ventures and The Ventures.
Open models, sovereign AI
Trillion Labs trains foundation models from scratch on large-scale Korean datasets, releasing its Tri series (7B to 70B parameters) as open models on Hugging Face — a milestone for Korean sovereign AI, which had previously relied on fine-tuned foreign base models. Its research includes rBridge, which predicts frontier reasoning capability from small proxy models, and Gravity Nano, a 16B-A3B mixture-of-experts model built for reasoning and agent workloads.
AI for AI factories
The company's long-term mission is 'recursive self-improving AI infrastructure' — AI systems that help design and operate the chips, energy and datacenter infrastructure needed to train the next generation of models, positioning Trillion Labs at the intersection of Korea's semiconductor strength and its sovereign AI ambitions.