A financial investment-specialized AI platform founded in the US by Koreans from Goldman Sachs and MIT.
Raised 9 billion won in seed funding, secured over 90 clients, including Fortune 50 companies, and achieved an average of 40% monthly growth.
A hedge fund manager managing trillions of won begins his or her day in a deluge of information. From US corporate performance to shifts in Asian supply chains to the European macro environment, the manager must discern implications amidst conflicting information, yet the gap between "seeing" the data and "judging" it remains significant.
Link Alpha emerged to fill this gap. It's an "AI thinking partner" that analyzes information on over 20,000 companies across 80 markets worldwide in 20 languages, helping investors ask better questions.
"If Bloomberg is a 'mirror' reflecting the market, Link Alpha aims to be the 'brain' that thinks alongside investors."
When asked about the company's identity, Link Alpha CEO Choi Ho-jun responded as follows: Link Alpha is a specialized AI platform for financial investment, co-founded in the United States in May 2024 by Koreans with backgrounds in global finance and technology, including Goldman Sachs, Qualcomm, and MIT.
Reading causal relationships in scattered signals
As an undergraduate, CEO Choi majored in diplomacy and became fascinated by the intertwining of politics, economics, and society, discerning the vast patterns that shaped their interactions. After embarking on a career in finance, he realized that his questions ultimately centered around the space known as the "market."
"The market is a system driven by collective intelligence, but inefficiencies still exist due to information fragmentation and language and regional barriers. Looking back, diplomacy and finance are fundamentally similar. They both involve a process of 'thinking'—deciphering vast causal relationships within scattered signals."
He began his career in the "IBD Solutions" team within the Corporate Finance (IB) division of Goldman Sachs Asia Pacific (Hong Kong). This elite team designed optimal solutions to corporate finance problems that defied traditional M&A, IPO, and bond issuance methods. Collaborating closely with diverse departments across the global team in New York, London, Singapore, Tokyo, and Seoul, he developed the "problem-solving muscle" to find optimal solutions within constraints.
Afterwards, I gained in-depth experience with the buy-side decision-making process at Macquarie PE, where I gained a firsthand understanding of what information investors crave and how they make decisions in the face of incomplete information. Working in finance, I felt the overabundance of information, yet the lack of a system that structurally supports thinking and judgment. Seeing the advent of the 2023 LLM program, I discovered the potential of the "Artificial Thinker," which extends human insight beyond mere task assistance.
"I discussed these issues in depth with my co-founders, who were developing machine learning-based insurance solutions at the time. We founded Link Alpha with the goal of combining our depth in the financial domain with our AI expertise to revolutionize how the market understands the world."
An "Insights Layer," Not a Data Vendor: Investors' Thinking Partner
Traditional financial information tools are data vendors that have significantly increased investor access to data. However, a significant gap still exists between "seeing" data and "making judgments" based on it.
CEO Choi said, “Link Alpha is not a data vendor, but an insight layer that focuses on how to connect vast amounts of data to lead to ‘meaningful decisions,’” and emphasized, “In the public market, the ability to decipher implications from conflicting information is more important than having a lot of information.”
The performance of US companies is linked to Asian supply chains, and changes in the European macro environment simultaneously impact global stock, currency, and raw material markets. Link Alpha helps investors ask better questions. It's designed to connect signals across languages, regions, and asset classes at a glance, allowing them to examine existing investment hypotheses from different perspectives.
"We aim to be a 'thinking partner' that helps investors ask better questions. Rather than simply providing more information, we're evolving our services to connect different regions, asset classes, and market signals into a single context, and to help investors question existing consensus."
Multi-agent system, analyst work time reduced to one-eighth
Link Alpha goes beyond simple automation and orchestrates sophisticated decision-making through its specialized financial "multi-agent system." This structure involves specialized financial AI agents working together under a single orchestrator, each task responsible for meeting preparation, data analysis, and idea generation.
“This concept has received significant attention since we announced it at NVIDIA GTC last year,” he said. “The reason it can reduce analysts’ repetitive tasks by one-eighth is not simply because it’s fast, but because it was designed with a precise understanding of the financial workflow.”
Link Alpha is recognized by the industry as having unrivaled competitiveness not only in how to effectively utilize LLM programs, but also in how to design and operate them to suit the financial environment.
"This approach is possible because we defined our specific customer base—the financial market—from the outset. Beyond providing individual functions, we also present a strategic roadmap for how to manage LLM from a financial institution's perspective and apply it across the organization."
Seed Fund: 9 Billion Won, Focused on Creating a "Technology Gap"
Last year, Link Alpha secured approximately 9 billion won in seed funding from investors including Atinum Investment, Intervest, Kakao Ventures, and Smilegate Investment. The investment was focused on creating a "long-term technological lead" rather than expanding externally.
"We believe that going beyond simple functional implementation, building an infrastructure and AI architecture capable of reliably handling massive amounts of data spanning global asset classes is essential for growth. Building on this solid technological foundation, we are preparing to attract our next round of investment in the first half of this year."
Currently, Link Alpha is a technology-focused organization, with 70% of its approximately 20 team members being engineers. The Seoul office serves as a "product hub," meticulously handling global financial data, while the New York office serves as a "business development hub" connecting with global clients. Half of Link Alpha's revenue comes from the US and Europe, and the other half from the Asia-Pacific region.
CEO Choi stated, "We adhere to the 'small, elite' principle rather than indiscriminate hiring," adding, "We believe that disruptive innovation is only possible when experts in each field collaborate at high density."
Global managers managing trillions of won are choosing Link Alpha as a strategic partner. Since monetizing in March of last year, the company has achieved an average monthly growth rate of 40%, and is expecting sales in the tens of billions of won in the first half of this year.
"It's particularly encouraging that we've secured global asset management companies and investment banks as clients and are participating in their management's strategic decision-making. Beyond simply selling tools, we're partnering with these institutions' executives to jointly design an 'AI roadmap' on how to integrate AI into their actual investment processes."
Leading the discourse with 'depth of thought'
CEO Choi was selected for the Forbes 30 Under 30 Tech category in 2023, and co-founders Chanyeol Choi and Yongjin Kim were selected for the Forbes 30 Under 30 Science category in 2021 and 2025, respectively.
"It's a clear reality that Asian entrepreneurs face barriers in the global financial market. Finance is a representative knowledge-based industry, long dominated by the most educated elites in each country. Within this industry, an invisible glass wall prevents non-mainstream individuals from gaining trust and entering the mainstream."
But AI is creating a slightly different environment, Choi said.
"In the global AI ecosystem, many Asians are already playing key roles. Furthermore, because this is a new industry, thought leadership, driven by vision and depth of thought, is far more important than school ties, blood ties, regional ties, or background."
Even before being selected by Forbes, Link Alpha has consistently shaped the discourse on financial AI. We've shared our vision for the future of the financial industry at conferences hosted by global financial institutions like BlackRock, UBS, and CLSA, and presented our research findings at international academic conferences such as ICLR, ICAIF, SIGIR, CIKM, and NeurIPS. We also host an annual conference called "AI for Finance," providing a forum for direct discussions with leaders from major financial institutions like Fidelity, Balyasny, Morgan Stanley, and AQR.
"Over the past year, I've gathered feedback from over 500 financial professionals and executives, listening to the questions the market is asking and the challenges they're facing. Thanks to this process, I believe I've been able to move beyond simply selling products and become a leader in shaping the market discourse, presenting a vision, and persuading potential customers."
Building an AI system that provides insight into how markets understand the world.
Link Alpha's mission is to "eliminate friction, connect the dots, and push the frontiers of contrarian thinking" in financial markets through AI.
"In the short term, we will focus on deeply penetrating the core workflows of our existing clients and establishing ourselves as an irreplaceable infrastructure. Link Alpha currently targets institutional investors as its core customers not simply because of market size, but because these institutions are the ones making the most complex decisions, often with incomplete information."
Link Alpha plans to expand its customer touchpoints in major global financial hubs such as New York, London, Hong Kong, and Singapore.
He expressed his ambition, saying, “Our ultimate goal is to build an AI system that ‘Solve How Markets Understand the World,’” and “Through this, we aim to establish ourselves as a company that sets the standard for thinking in the global financial market.”
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