Neer Labs secures seed funding from innovation center

Neer Labs, the operator of Neer, which maps popular dining and travel content from Instagram and YouTube using AI, has secured seed funding from the Gyeonggi Creative Economy Innovation Center. The center identified Neer Labs through its startup support program, BuS. The amount of the investment has not been disclosed, and the center plans to support further growth through the TIPS program.

Neer utilizes AI to analyze content featuring restaurants, cafes, and travel destinations shared on social media, connecting these places to actual location information and displaying them on a map. The company has collaborated with 12 creators, who collectively have a following of 1.27 million. When locations introduced by creators are featured on the Neer map, fans visit these places and share their experiences and discoveries with each other.

Neer Labs is preparing to launch a prepaid discount ticket system. This system will allow fans to purchase discount tickets for locations introduced by creators at a reduced price. This approach helps stores track the effectiveness of their marketing efforts, as they only pay for tickets that are sold and can verify how many customers were attracted by specific creators. Creators will earn revenue based on their sales performance, reducing reliance on individual sponsorships. Neer Labs plans to streamline the ticket redemption process to make it easy for stores to implement without requiring additional training.

The technology development scope will expand beyond collaborating creators to encompass all content. After interviewing over 100 users, Neer Labs found that long YouTube videos were the most trusted content for making destination decisions due to their lower advertising influence and the wealth of information they provide. However, users need to rewind these lengthy videos to recall the names of the places featured. Neer Labs is developing AI that automatically identifies locations within long videos and transfers them to a map, along with its own AI model capable of processing many videos at low cost. The story was reported by Platum.