TraceWeave Raises KRW 3 Billion Seed Round Led by Mirae Asset Capital for On-Device AI

TraceWeave raised approximately KRW 3 billion in a seed round led by Mirae Asset Capital at a pre-money valuation of approximately KRW 30 billion, the company said. Startup Researcher reported the round for the on-device AI startup led by CEO Jaeyoung Park.

NAVER D2SF Backs TraceWeave's Phase-TITAN Architecture

NAVER D2SF announced on October 20, 2026, that it made a new investment in TraceWeave, the team behind Phase-TITAN, a post-Transformer architecture that understands long contexts and carries out multi-step tasks while keeping memory usage constant. NAVER D2SF recognized the company's core technology for enabling AI agents on resource-constrained devices. Naver reported that the seed round was led by Future Asset Capital and raised about 30 billion won, valuing the company at 300 billion won, and that TraceWeave plans to use the funds for talent acquisition and business expansion.

Phase-TITAN replaces the conventional Transformer design, and TraceWeave develops its own AI models rather than relying on existing open-source models. According to TraceWeave, at a 1M-token context without quantization, a comparable Transformer's KV-Cache holds tens of gigabytes or more, while its 1B Phase-TITAN model holds 0.04 GB. TraceWeave's internal benchmarks on RULER and BFCL indicate that Phase-TITAN maintains performance on par with Transformer models of the same size and larger, and the company has demonstrated a multi-step agent running on a smartphone using only its CPU, without cloud calls.

In mobility, TraceWeave completed a paid pilot with the autonomous driving affiliate of a global automotive group, identifying driving-data frames that improve the partner's autonomous driving model without human annotation. It is also validating in-vehicle agent performance with a global automotive electronics software company and exploring opportunities in robots, drones, smart glasses, and wearables. TraceWeave was a Top 20 finalist in NVIDIA's 2026 Inception Grand Challenge and was co-founded in October 2025 by researchers with backgrounds at ETH Zurich, Google, and KAIST. Based at NAVER D2SF in Gangnam, the company is led by co-founder and CEO Jaeyoung Park.

Jaeyoung Park, co-founder and CEO of TraceWeave, said that removing the KV cache was never the hard part and that staying capable without it was the real challenge. He added that Phase-TITAN already delivers Transformer-class capability without the Transformer's memory tax, and the next model goes well beyond its class with memory still fixed. Sanghwan Yang, Head of NAVER D2SF, described on-device AI as a core technology for complex, advanced AI across diverse device environments, offering advantages in reducing cloud call costs and protecting privacy.

Seed Rounds Across On-Device and Robotics AI

Electric Plant Company emerged from stealth on October 20, 2026, with $11.2 million in seed funding and Bombadil, a foundation AI model for plant electrophysiology, Startup Researcher reported. Dream Labs raised $90 million in seed funding led by B Capital on October 19, 2026, and launched Dream API, a public API for robot control, FinancialContent Business Page reported. DeepSeek plans to invest in a startup founded by Yu Tao, who left ZhiJi Dynamics to focus on LLM and embodied intelligence, with a second round valuation of 200 million USD, 链捕手 ChainCatcher reported on October 15, 2026.

TraceWeave's Next Steps After the Seed Round

TraceWeave plans to use the funds for talent acquisition and business expansion, according to Naver. The company is validating in-vehicle agent performance with a global automotive electronics software company and exploring opportunities in robots, drones, smart glasses, and wearables.