Series Ventures Backs AI Speech Rehabilitation Startup Golden Brain Care in Seed Round

Series Ventures, an accelerator focused on South Korea's southeastern region, has made a seed investment in Golden Brain Care.

Series Ventures said on Sept. 15 that it had completed a seed investment in Golden Brain Care (㈜골든브레인케어), a company building AI-based speech rehabilitation tools. The size of the investment was not disclosed.

Founded in Busan in 2026, Golden Brain Care develops and operates Brain Friends (브레인프렌즈), an AI-based speech rehabilitation platform for patients who have difficulty communicating because of neurological conditions such as stroke, brain injury and dementia. Brain Friends links language function assessment, personalised rehabilitation exercises, analysis of performance data and reports for caregivers into a single workflow.

More than 1 million people in South Korea have cerebrovascular disease, and a substantial share of them also have communication disorders such as aphasia or dysarthria. Speech rehabilitation depends heavily on a therapist's expert observation and assessment, but because assessment and training records have been kept largely on paper test sheets, systematically accumulating data has been difficult. Managing repeated practice outside the therapy room has also been limited. That is the background to growing demand for digital tools that can improve both the continuity and the accessibility of rehabilitation.

Golden Brain Care is developing technology that uses AI to analyse voice, facial movement and response data in order to manage the speech rehabilitation process quantitatively. The platform provides language function assessment and personalised rehabilitation training, and analyses completion rates, response times and error types for caregiver reports. The aim is to allow training and monitoring to continue in everyday settings. The company is also working on on-device AI to minimise external transmission of sensitive data such as voice recordings and facial video.

The company's strength lies in a team that combines clinical experience in speech rehabilitation with AI development capability. Chief executive Lee Hyun-song holds a first-class speech-language pathologist licence in South Korea and designs the service on the basis of clinical experience. Speech rehabilitation specialists take part in developing the rehabilitation content, while AI development is handled by the company's in-house research institute. The company is also widening a network of collaborators that includes academics in special therapy, speech and hearing rehabilitation and cognitive rehabilitation, as well as neurology, neurosurgery and rehabilitation medical institutions, building a base for technical and clinical validation.

The company has released an MVP of Brain Friends and is running field trials. It has been selected for a clinical data AI demonstration project at Konyang University Hospital, a demonstration technology service programme run by the Korea Testing Laboratory (KTL), and a full-lifecycle technical support programme for the safety management of innovative medical devices, laying groundwork for product development and medical device approval.

Its business strategy is staged. It will first test commercial viability in public voucher markets — developmental rehabilitation services, language development support and treatment support provided through provincial education offices — and with SaaS sold to institutions. It then plans to build up clinical evidence and a regulatory track record in order to expand into digital therapeutics, which require medical device approval.

Kwak Sung-wook and Park Jun-sang, co-chief executives of Series Ventures, said: "Speech rehabilitation is a field that demands a high level of expertise and at the same time depends on repeated practice outside the therapy room and data-based management." They added: "Golden Brain Care is turning the actual speech rehabilitation process into a product on the basis of its chief executive's clinical expertise, and we judged its strategy realistic — validating early commercial viability in the public voucher and institutional markets, then accumulating clinical and regulatory capability before expanding."

Lee Hyun-song, chief executive of Golden Brain Care, said: "Losing speech is more than a difficulty in communication; it has a major effect on daily life and relationships." He added: "On the basis of this investment we will continue to raise the completeness of the product and its clinical evidence, and refine the service so that more patients can receive continuous speech rehabilitation with fewer constraints of place and setting."