AI Note-taker 'Tiro' Secures 800 Million KRW Seed Investment

Smilegate Investment and Mashup Ventures Participate

The Plato, which provides the AI note-taking service ‘Tiro’ that offers real-time conversation recording and high-quality summary notes, announced on the 6th that it has secured a total of 800 million KRW in seed investment from Smilegate Investment and Mashup Ventures.

Founded in 2024, The Plato was co-founded by Seoul National University alumni including CEO Eunseong Lim, a serial entrepreneur who majored in mathematics and computer science at Seoul National University and worked as an AI engineer; Director Sangcheol Kim, former frontend lead at Qanda; and Director Yuna Hong, who worked as a venture capital (VC) analyst after exiting a startup.

‘Tiro’ is an AI note-taking service that records multilingual conversations in real time and generates high-quality summary notes. Beyond simple transcription, the AI automatically structures and organizes the conversation content, understands the user’s context, and instantly creates a one-page document in the desired format. It is widely used in business settings such as meetings, lectures, and interviews, quickly securing paying customers including global startups and VCs. Through word of mouth among AI experts alone, it has surpassed 15,000 cumulative users, recording annual sales of several hundred million KRW and a subscription renewal rate exceeding 90%.

With this investment, The Plato plans to expand its service coverage by supporting all environments including real-time face-to-face meetings as well as mobile, tablet, and desktop platforms. It also aims to develop the service into an all-in-one AI assistant that records all conversational situations.

CEO Eunseong Lim said, “We are very pleased to have secured investment from the best partners who believe in our potential,” adding, “We aim to maximize competitiveness in the application area that directly connects with customers and become the world’s number one product in the voice AI application sector, recreating the Notion myth.”

Joo-yjin Cho, team leader at Smilegate Investment who led the investment, said, “The Plato is a team rapidly growing with the goal of becoming a global AI Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) from its early startup stage,” and added, “Having personally used Tiro for more than three hours daily, I experienced a complete transformation in the quality of meetings. We expect The Plato to grow into the next unicorn in the voice AI field, which has emerged as a new growth axis after large language models (LLM).”