Series Ventures Makes Seed Investment in Data- and AI-Based Child Growth Care Firm WithDoctors

Series Ventures, an accelerator focused on companies in South Korea's southeastern region, said on Sept. 8 that it had completed a seed investment in WithDoctors (위드닥터스), a company specialising in growth care for children and adolescents, headed by Bae Yoon-jung. The amount was not disclosed.

Spending on children's height and physical growth is rising quickly amid low birth rates and the spread of "gold kids" consumption, in which families concentrate spending on a single child. Related markets including growth hormone injections, health functional foods and growth exercise centres have expanded together, and the market for height-growth health functional foods in particular has grown more than 800 percent over the past five years to about 259.9 billion won. Most services, however, remain limited to piecemeal management centred on injections or tests, and integrated services that address exercise, nutrition, psychology and sleep together are hard to find.

WithDoctors operates a multidisciplinary growth care model combining medical care, exercise, nutrition, psychology and sleep. Rather than replacing growth treatment, the approach seeks to reduce the factors impeding growth, which differ from child to child, and to continuously manage the factors involved in growth. The company collects multidisciplinary data through detailed testing covering some 210 items, and a team of doctorate-level specialists designs individually tailored growth strategies.

The company's core assets are its in-house growth management CRM system, an AI growth management platform and its own care framework, called the RESST system. Test, questionnaire and prescription data are managed together to automatically generate individual growth assessment reports, and the company plans to extend the functions to growth prediction, analysis of inhibiting factors and recommendation of tailored programmes based on accumulated data. It has gathered about 70,000 test records to date, and the re-enrolment rate for its three-month programme has exceeded 80 percent.

WithDoctors was founded in 2024 and holds certification as a corporate research institute and as a venture company. It runs a first branch in Hanam and is preparing to open a second in the Daechi district.

Kwak Sung-wook and Park Jun-sang, co-chief executives of Series Ventures, said WithDoctors is "a rare team that brings the fragmented field of growth management together from the perspectives of medical care, exercise, nutrition, psychology and sleep, and standardises it with data and AI," adding that "on the basis of proven offline operating know-how and its own technology, it has strong potential to set the standard for the domestic growth care market."

Bae Yoon-jung, chief executive of WithDoctors, said, "Our role is to design and manage each child's different growth environment and process on scientific grounds," and added, "With this investment, we will spread data-based growth care so that more children can realise their growth potential."