SEOUL, – WEKA, a U.S.-based artificial intelligence (AI) data platform company, officially announced Thursday it has established a regional office in South Korea, the first of its kind in the Asia-Pacific region, saying it will support local AI companies achieve innovation in terms of data management.

Established in 2013, WEKA helps organizations store, process, and manage data in the cloud and on premises to fuel next-generation workloads.

With the establishment of its Seoul office, the platform company said it will provide a software solution to South Korean companies aiming to develop secure and efficient AI platforms, and help AI companies optimize their performance and cost-efficiency.

“We are the only storage vendor, the only data management vendor, where the exact same product that runs on premises also runs on the cloud,” WEKA’s co-founder and CEO, Liran Zvibel, said in a press conference held in Seoul, noting its solution can run on major clouds, including those developed by Google and Amazon Web Services, as well as on-premise infrastructures.

Zvibel said the company decided to open its first Asian-Pacific office in Seoul because “it is easier for future-looking technologies to be successful here” as the market is innovative and practical when picking good solutions and products.

WEKA will provide better speed, simplicity and sustainability for managing data as well as different storage scales to local businesses in the AI, financial services, pharmaceutical, entertainment and manufacturing industries, he added.

In November last year, WEKA raised US$135 million in Series D funding from Nvidia, Samsung Catalyst Fund, a venture capital fund under South Korean tech giant Samsung Electronics Co., and others.

Kim Seung-whoon, former head of Inspur Korea, has been appointed as the head of WEKA’s Korean branch.

Source: Yonhap News Agency