Kim Dong-yeon Meets Global Unicorn Startup CEOs, Launches Gyeonggi Province Sales Pitch

[Suwon Ilbo=Reporter Kim Gap-dong] Gyeonggi Province Governor Kim Dong-yeon, attending the '2025 World Economic Forum (Davos Forum)' held in Switzerland, has begun full-scale diplomatic and investment attraction activities by meeting with executives of world-renowned unicorn companies and emphasizing the need for cooperation with Gyeonggi Province.

The province announced on the 22nd that Governor Kim began official Davos Forum schedules starting with attending the official welcome banquet of the Innovators Community on the 20th (local time).

The Innovators Community official welcome banquet is well-known as a venue for information exchange and cooperation building among startup leaders from around the world.

The World Economic Forum gave special significance by being the only one to officially introduce Governor Kim among the welcome banquet attendees.

Jeremy Jurgens, Managing Director of the World Economic Forum, introduced Governor Kim as the governor of Gyeonggi Province, which jointly established the 'Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution' with the World Economic Forum, and is representing Korea.

The Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution (C4IR) is a regional cooperation hub established through consultation between the World Economic Forum and each country or region in response to the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Since its first establishment in San Francisco, USA in 2017, 25 centers worldwide are currently operating in countries including Germany and India. Governor Kim agreed with the World Economic Forum (Davos Forum) during his 2024 Davos Forum participation to establish a Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution in Gyeonggi Province. The province established the Gyeonggi Province Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution at the Pangyo Creative Economy Innovation Center in January this year and began operations. An official opening ceremony will be held at a later date. The Gyeonggi Province Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution is receiving attention from the World Economic Forum as the first center to focus on startups.

The official welcome banquet that followed featured keynote addresses by Professor Yoshua Bengio, founder of the Machine Learning Research Institute at the University of Montreal, Canada, and Meredith Whitaker, president of the Signal Foundation, emphasizing cooperation to minimize negative impacts in the AI era.

Governor Kim exchanged with various business figures as well as global company executives on that day, introducing Korea's situation and Gyeonggi Province. In particular, he met with 20 global unicorn company executives (unlisted startups valued at over 1 trillion won) and devoted himself to Gyeonggi Province sales activities.

The unicorn companies Governor Kim met with on that day include ▲Adam Goldstein, co-founder of Archer, a U.S. company famous for developing electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft (eVTOL) ▲Motoyuki Arai, founder of Synspective, a Japanese small satellite development company ▲Robert Falk, CEO of Einride, a Swedish company that developed autonomous trucks, among others.

Additionally, he met with representatives of leading AI unicorn companies including Jasper.ai, an AI marketing platform development company called the "robot writer," Squirrel AI, an educational technology company specializing in intelligent adaptive learning, and Crusoe, an AI cloud company.

He also met with Jung Se-joo, Chairman of Noom, a representative U.S. digital healthcare platform company co-founded by a Korean, and Brandon Seo, CEO of Lunit, a Korean medical artificial intelligence (AI) company, encouraging them and requesting cooperation with Gyeonggi Province.

The province plans to open practical channels with these companies to materialize cooperation.

The World Economic Forum (WEF), well-known as the 'Davos Forum,' is held in Davos, Switzerland from January 20th to 24th and is the world's largest 'brainstorming' conference where renowned entrepreneurs, economists, politicians, and journalists from approximately 130 countries worldwide gather to discuss economic issues and seek international action items.

This year's theme is 'Cooperation in the Intelligent Age,' and the event is attended by approximately 350 senior government officials from various countries, more than 900 company chief executive officers (CEOs), academics and non-governmental organization (NGO) officials, and others, totaling approximately 2,500 participants, including Governor Kim. U.S. President Trump is scheduled to be a speaker for a special online address on the 23rd.