GeoVector spent the week of 20 October in Korea as one of 29 startups at ASEAN-Korea Startup Week 2026, the ASEAN-Korea Centre's annual programme for early-stage founders from Southeast Asia. Four days took the cohort from an opening programme in Seoul to the Future Innovation Tech Expo (FIX 2026) at EXCO in Daegu. There, our co-founder and CEO Razvan Iordache pitched at the ASEAN-Korea Startup Demo Day on Thursday 22 October, and the team ran a booth on the programme's pavilion.
About ASEAN-Korea Startup Week
The ASEAN-Korea Centre has run Startup Week every year since 2018 to connect early-stage ASEAN startups with Korean investors, accelerators and venture capital. The 2025 edition moved beyond a pitching contest towards in-person acceleration. The 2026 edition keeps that shape and spends three of its four days in Daegu, where the cohort pitches, exhibits and meets buyers inside FIX 2026.
The work started before anyone flew in. PEN Ventures ran a pre-programme for every company: a Korea Landing Camp and a one-to-one IR clinic, which produced the final deck each startup presented on Demo Day. Mybit handled operations and logistics for the week.
The week's programme
| Day | Where | Programme |
|---|---|---|
| Tue 20 Oct | Seoul, Ondream Society Square | Opening programme with welcome remarks from Kim Jae-shin, Secretary General of the ASEAN-Korea Centre, and three sessions: venture capital and entrepreneurship (Prof. Kim Young-Kyu, Korea University Business School), the K-Startup Grand Challenge and its ASEAN alumni (Lee Jeong-yun, Gyeonggi Center for Creative Economy & Innovation), and a foreign founder's journey in Korea (Ravi Shankar Pandit, Konnect). Official luncheon, then the group transfer to Daegu. |
| Wed 21 Oct | Daegu, EXCO | Demo Day for companies 1 to 15, ASEAN-Korea Startup Meetup, FIX buyer and export business matching, and the FIX 2026 Daegu Night networking dinner. |
| Thu 22 Oct | Daegu, EXCO | Demo Day for companies 16 to 29, including GeoVector, a second Startup Meetup round, then a cultural tour and dinner at E-World 83 Tower. |
| Fri 23 Oct | Daegu | Visit to the Daegu Center for Creative Economy & Innovation, then departure. |
Schedule as published in the organisers' participant manual.
Our pitch at Demo Day
Demo Day ran on the pavilion's pitching stage over two mornings, fifteen companies on Wednesday and fourteen on Thursday, with PEN Ventures as MC. Each company got five minutes: three to pitch and two for questions from the invited investors. They scored each pitch on business viability, technology and product strength, team capability and market potential, and their written feedback goes back to the founders after the session. Thursday's session covered startups from Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.
Razvan opened on the line that sums up the company: win the AI conversations that matter. Then he showed the change behind it. A search engine hands back a page of links and leaves the choosing to you. Ask an AI assistant which running shoes to compare and it names three brands and tells you why. The brands on that list get considered. The ones left off it never find out what they lost.
The pitch framed this as a shift in three steps. Search engine optimisation was about getting found: people searched and clicked. Generative engine optimisation (GEO), where the market is today, is about getting recommended: the AI suggests and people decide. Next comes AI agent optimisation (AAO), which is about getting chosen, as agents compare options and act for the buyer. GeoVector measures AI visibility today. Analytics and optimisation for AI agents come next.
From there the pitch turned to the product. Setup starts from a brand's website: enter the domain and pick a country and language, and GeoVector identifies the competitors and writes the prompts automatically. The team then chooses which AI assistants to track. Razvan stressed that the answers come from the live assistants, not their APIs, captured through in-market browsers with geo-targeting and in the local language. What gets recorded is the answer a buyer actually sees, down to the brands, citations and placements in it.
That measurement feeds a repeatable loop. Measure where the brand appears. Improve it by creating and publishing content AI assistants can use. Verify by rechecking the answers and the referrals they send. The slide in the photo below, Built for brand and commerce teams, then split GeoVector into the two views those teams ask for:
- Brand recommendations. Which brands an assistant names when someone asks who to buy from, in what order, and where yours sits against your competitors.
- Product visibility. Which specific products surface when someone shops through an assistant, and whether yours are among them.
The last two slides covered the team and the ask. The team slide paired marketing insight with engineering depth. Razvan is a former Google data scientist with more than 15 years in marketing analytics. Feipeng is a former Google Staff Engineer who worked on Google Pay infrastructure, and a book author. The close asked the room to start with a simple product test: scan the QR code and GeoVector builds a sample report for their fund or company.
At the booth
Between sessions the team was on the ASEAN-Korea Startup Week pavilion at W2-166 in EXCO West Hall 2, where each startup had a panel under its country's flag. Ours led with Be the Brand AI Recommends and a QR code for a free AI visibility report.
The engine list on that panel starts with Naver, and that was deliberate. In Korea, people get AI answers from Naver's AI Briefing as well as from ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity and Google. A brand that wants to be recommended there needs to know what all of them say, in Korean, to a buyer in Korea.
Investor and buyer meetings
The afternoons were for meetings. The ASEAN-Korea Startup Meetup paired each startup with Korean buyers and VCs, all team lead level or above, in round-based one-to-one meetings at fixed investor tables. Each company had two 30-minute meetings on Wednesday and a 15-minute meeting on Thursday, plus an extra slot for meetings investors asked for after Demo Day. Counterpart details were shared in advance, and the organisers follow up within a week wherever both sides confirm interest.
On Wednesday afternoon FIX ran its own buyer and export business matching, organised by EXCO and KOTRA, with pre-matched buyers and interpreters in dedicated consultation rooms. That evening's FIX 2026 Daegu Night, a networking dinner in EXCO's Grand Ballroom, brought exhibitors, buyers and organisers together.
FIX 2026 in context
Startup Week sat inside a much bigger show. FIX 2026, the Future Innovation Tech Expo, ran from 21 to 24 October at EXCO under the theme "AI, beyond technology, into everyday life". This third edition combines four shows: mobility (DIFA), robotics (ROBEX), ICT (the ICT Convergence Expo Korea, ITCE) and startups. Electronic Times reported a record 588 exhibitors, 162 of them (27.6%) from overseas, up from 500 exhibitors and 16.6% the year before.
The Startup Week pavilion was part of ITCE, now in its 21st year, which Electronic Times put at 162 companies and organisations across 400 booths. This year's ICT floor was about AI in use: industrial AI, cloud, sensors and workplace safety. It also drew ASEAN AI companies for the first time, alongside 19 AI firms from Zhejiang, China. Daegu's figures put the conference at 60 speakers from 17 countries. Keynotes came from Prof. Kyu-Jin Cho (Seoul National University), Brian McMurray (GM Technical Center Korea), Prof. Xiaoxiao Li (Vector Institute) and Francesco Ferro (PAL Robotics).
Much of the floor was about AI leaving the lab for factories, vehicles and robots. Our corner of it asked a narrower question with the same shape: once an AI system is what people ask, who does it recommend?
Frequently asked questions
What is ASEAN-Korea Startup Week?
It is an annual programme run by the ASEAN-Korea Centre since 2018 that connects early-stage ASEAN startups with Korean investors, accelerators and buyers. The 2026 edition brought 29 startups from all ten ASEAN member states to Seoul and Daegu from 20 to 23 October, with Demo Day pitches, a pavilion at FIX 2026 and one-to-one investor meetings.
What is FIX 2026?
FIX 2026, the Future Innovation Tech Expo, is a technology exhibition at EXCO in Daegu covering mobility, robotics, ICT and startups. The 2026 edition ran from 21 to 24 October with 588 exhibitors, according to Electronic Times.
Does GeoVector track Naver?
Yes. For brands in Korea, GeoVector tracks Naver's AI Briefing alongside ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, Google AI Overview and Google AI Mode, using real browser sessions in the market being measured.
Thank you
Thanks to IMDA and Enterprise Singapore for the opportunity to join the programme, and to the ASEAN-Korea Centre for hosting and for bringing founders from all ten ASEAN countries to Daegu. Thanks also to PEN Ventures for the IR clinic and for running Demo Day, to Mybit for keeping 29 companies on schedule across two cities, and to the investors and buyers who sat down with us.
If you scanned the QR code at the booth or on Demo Day, or missed us and want to see what AI assistants say about your brand in Korea or anywhere else, request a free AI visibility report or get in touch.