Ewha Womans University’s Startup Support Foundation Successfully Concludes “UpGrounder 1st Cohort N
- Date2025.08.29
- 10026
AI-based startup ideas gathered in one place… 52 student startup teams from 8 universities participate
A launching pad for promising startup teams
The startup support foundation (led by Sang-Jun Kim) successfully held the demo day for “2025 UpGrounder 1st cohort”, which is a short-term practice education program for student startup teams, from August 22nd (FRI) to 23rd (SAT).
“UpGrounder” is a project-form startup education program aimed to facilitate the startup environment within universities and reinforcing abilities in real practice, it is also planned to let student startup teams not only simply propose ideas, but also to define problems based on users, producing MVP, and evolve into promising startup teams by practicing sustainable execution abilities by step-by-step market training.
This year, including Ewha Womans University, 8 Universities including Korea University, Chung-Ang University, Tech University of Korea, and the Hankuk University of Foreign Studies and 11 technology startup teams participated, a total of 52 students. From last month’s 21st to this month’s 23rd, the program was conducted both offline and online for a month on Ewha campus, and as a part of the Ministry of Education’s SCOUT business, was supported the entire education fees and mentoring fees.
This program was planned into 3 stages, specifying ideas at “Sprint Camp,” freely developing projects on “Value-up Week,” and showing final results on “Demo Day.” The participating teams showed their possibilities for growth with excellent competency and potentials through the process, and for the running of the program a professional corporation for education on AI and startup education, ‘Like Lion (president: Sung-Yung Na)’ cooperated and supported the growth of the students.
On Demo Day, which was held on last 22nd to 23rd, various creative ideas were presented in areas ranging from education, finance, healthcare, contents, etc. Based on the final judges’ inspections, the grand prize went to the union team comprising of Ewha Womans University and YoungNam University, the “Caring Bridge” team for developing work reinforcing AI solution on laws, labor, and notice information made for people working at long-term care facilities. The 2nd place went to Ewha Womans University’s “GoA” team for proposing AI solution “Interny” for process-based intern recruitment evaluation, and the excellence award went to Ewha Womans University’s “EDM GADGET” team for developing solution for XAI-based data center’s electric energy’s optimization.
Ewha Womans University’s Startup Support Foundation will continue to support the winning teams to participate in SCOUT program and stage-based startup support business.
Sang-Jun Kim, the president of the Startup Support Foundation, mentioned “As much as the AI startup business is getting heated, we will reinforce practice education to enable students to overcome troubles in real life commercialization,” and added “we will actively support the participating teams by incorporating the startup infrastructure and network of our university’s startup support foundation, and the professionalism of ‘Like Lion, so that they will have global competency.”
The Startup Support Foundation is collaborating with the Ministry of Education, Ministry of Science and ICT, and the Ministry of SMEs and etc, government institutions and Seoul City to support student and faculty members’ startups, running startup-friendly school policies, fostering lab startup talents, and others like enlarging global startup exchange, leading women-based startup ecosystem.