MVNT, Building 'Dance IP' Infrastructure for Games, Raises Seed Round

MVNT, a Seoul-based startup developing AI tools and licensing infrastructure for 3D dance animation, has raised a seed round from Mashup Ventures, the company announced Wednesday. The size of the round was not disclosed. Mashup Ventures, an early-stage Korean firm, has previously backed home-design platform Bucket Place (operator of Ohou) and travel-booking app MyRealTrip.

Founded three years ago, MVNT runs what it calls an "Emote Publisher" — a service that turns trending styles of dance, from K-pop and hip-hop to acrobatics and contemporary, into licensed animation assets. The company uses proprietary 3D motion capture and deep learning to produce game-ready animations and sells them to game studios and virtual production teams. Its assets are designed to be natively compatible with titles like Fortnite and PUBG: Battlegrounds. The company was co-founded by Youngjun Choi, a K-pop choreographer with credits including SEVENTEEN and TWICE, and Joon Jung, a serial entrepreneur who studied International Studies and modern dance at Hanyang University. The two work under the slogan "Own Your Movement."

Beyond its B2B animation business, MVNT is also developing a consumer-facing product, the MVNT Community App, which lets users book and pay for dance classes from instructors around the world. The app recently wrapped beta testing in Toronto and is set to launch in Korea and Japan in the second half of the year. The funding comes amid mounting scrutiny over how choreographers' work is used — and reused — across games and entertainment platforms, where unauthorized copying of dance routines has become a recurring legal flashpoint internationally. "This is the first dance IP distribution system of its kind anywhere in the world," Eunwoo Park, a partner at Mashup Ventures, said in a statement. "We expect MVNT to become something like the Universal Music Group of dance." Choi, who serves as MVNT's executive producer, received Korea's Prime Minister's Commendation at the 2020 Korea Popular Culture and Arts Awards. He recently drew attention for blending house music influences into SEVENTEEN's new single "Maestro." He is also the inaugural vice president of the Korea Choreography Copyright Association. Jung, the company's chief executive, framed the opportunity as a technical and economic one. "Across the major 3D industry — NVIDIA, Epic Games — dance has long been one of the hardest asset categories to produce, because the libraries, data labels, and copyright frameworks simply weren't there," he said. "The demand in digital worlds is enormous. Our goal is to clear that bottleneck and route more of the value back to the choreographers."