Lotte Ventures, Lotte Group’s corporate venture capital (CVC), announced on the 14th that it has selected 10 innovative startups to participate in the 14th cohort of L-CAMP (hereinafter, L-CAMP) and the 6th cohort of The Food Changers.
L-CAMP is Lotte Ventures’ flagship open innovation program. It assigns dedicated investment review officers to each company, providing close support for business growth between startups and Lotte Group affiliates. This year, from the recruitment stage, major affiliates disclosed their collaboration needs and opened every available business area—such as distribution, commerce, advertising, logistics, healthcare, and construction—so the program was conducted in a startup-driven bottom-up proposal approach.
In the 14th cohort of L-CAMP and the 6th cohort of The Food Changers, promising startups demonstrating standout performance across a range of fields—including AI, commerce, new materials, hyper-personalized solutions, and food tech—were selected.
The selected L-CAMP companies are: Vertical Labs(No-code robot AI data collection and learning software platform “Easy Trainer”), Team Limited(Commerce AI based on the receipt platform “Young-gkkoel”), Graybox(CRM marketing automation solution for retail and commerce platforms), Highst Ranger(Biometric-signal-based multimodal Emotion AI analysis solution “Insight Flow”), Famkov(Reverse logistics solutions for returns and inventory), and AIv(Fully distributed cloud that reduces cloud costs by 40% or more)—six firms in total.
For the 6th cohort of The Food Changers, four companies were chosen: Dareumdal-eum(A pre-processing food-tech platform that reduces hazardous materials in raw ingredients and adds taste and functionality), Vivid Health(A unified medication, weight, and diet management platform “Bbi-yak” for users of GLP-1 obesity treatment drugs), Inuff You(An AI-based simplified complementary feeding solution for infants and toddlers “Inuff Recipe”), and K-Bio Gateway(A dual-action functional probiotic for body fat reduction “DH24”). These companies plan to propose innovative solutions tailored to each affiliate and pursue actual technology development and joint commercialization models.
The selected companies and Lotte Group affiliate hands-on mentor teams held a business meetup event, alongside a recent orientation. The mentor teams, composed of personnel responsible for practical work at each affiliate, plan to further develop PoCs (proof of technology and project feasibility) with each selected company starting in May. At the event, Lee Soo-hyun, CEO of Romancive, a participating company in the 5th cohort of The Food Changers, attended and shared know-how on how it carried out PoCs with multiple affiliates—including Lotte Hotels and Lotte Department Stores—and led to attracting investment.
To ensure the successful operation of this program, the Korea Institute of Startup Promotion, Korea Institute of Agricultural Technology Promotion, Seoul National University Bundang Hospital, and ACNCDC participate as partners to support the effort across the board. For selected companies, Lotte Ventures will provide tangible benefits aimed at driving real growth—such as PoC and business commercialization linkage among group companies, an acceleration program, and voucher support. It also plans to actively consider running office hours by specialized field and conducting direct investments.
Through a welcome address, Seung-wook Kim, CEO of Lotte Ventures, emphasized that the Lotte Group places great importance on the process of jointly leading the group’s sustainable growth by contributing to the success of startups. He then encouraged the participating companies, expressing hope that trial and error and experiences gained on-site during the program period will become valuable assets for growth.
Meanwhile, Lotte Ventures plans to hold a final demo day in November to share collaboration outcomes between startups and group companies at the enterprise level. Through this, it will provide opportunities for follow-up collaborations and investment attraction, and further strengthen its sustainable co-growth partnership between the Lotte Group and startups.