Korean tech giant LG makes everything out of televisions (They announced some new ones at CES), washing machines and refrigerators, well, It will likely take less time to list the things they are not involved in. It should come as no surprise that the company has a keen interest in innovation, and LG Nova is its relatively new North American innovation hub. Based in Santa Clara in Silicon Valley, California, the LG business unit is finding new and exciting ways to partner with startups to advance LG’s mission in some of its core growth areas.
At the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, the company announced the first companies shortlisted to work with the electronics giant. The startups share some commonalities that highlight and reinforce some of the focus areas for the company’s innovation areas.
LG Nova aspires to be the center of the Venn diagram of the entire startup ecosystem, including startups of course. It seeks to combine this with LG’s own strengths and advantages, including the broader investor landscape, big tech, academia, the entrepreneurial community and, where appropriate, LG’s own sales and marketing channels.
The current program that LG Nova is running is the Mission for the Future challenge, which is essentially a filtering system to find the most promising entrepreneurs and startups to work with LG’s resident entrepreneurs to Create businesses within the LG ecosystem. order for the futureis LG Nova’s nine-month annual challenge program, created to search the world for the best ideas, concepts and companies that will improve the quality of life in a smarter, healthier and more connected future.
The first big issue for LG in this area is connected health, with a particular focus on doubling down on healthcare to meet people’s wellness needs in healthcare settings, at home, or through healthcare services. LG Nova announced its first two shortlisted companies as XR Health, which offers VR treatment rooms for telemedicine services, and Maya MD, an AI digital health assistant that uses LG TVs to encourage consumers to have active conversations about their health.
the metaverse is the second broad category that LG Nova is paying particular attention to, in what appears to be a broader exploration of how humans and machines can connect in new interaction modalities. Here announced LG Nova iQ3, which builds enterprise applications and services for product training for the Metaverse, and I3M, building a hyper-realistic virtual travel and tourism experience.
According to the company, sustainable mobility is the third pillar in LG’s innovation drive energetic mobility. SparkCharge is an interesting company that makes the charging of electric vehicles mobile and at the same time pays attention to sustainability. Driivz, meanwhile is building a kind of operating system for the charging management of electric vehicles.
The final part of LG Nova’s innovation pie chart is all about Smart Lifestyles, which seems to be LG-speak for smart home technology. In this universe, they have chosen a universal smart key technology, EveryKey, which allows you to unlock your car, phone and doors with a single device while protecting your website logins A.kin AI is a company working to add virtual assistant technology to LG’s hardware products. It is specifically aimed at households with home care coordination challenges for a neurodiverse audience. chiefling completes the Smart Lifestyle Cabal with a solution for planning, shopping and cooking meals that fit your dietary needs.
The announced startups give you a behind-the-scenes look at the kind of things LG Nova is looking for. The next batch will open to applications later this year, and at CES, I spoke at length with the program leader to learn more about what LG is looking for, how the program aims to partner with startups, and how to get the attention of the incubator’s selection committee.
