For years, Korea digital healthcare was a story told in the future tense. Promising algorithms, impressive clinical studies, government backing — but quarter after quarter, the same uncomfortable truth: these companies were burning cash, not making it. That story ended in 2025.
In a single fiscal year, Korea’s major medical AI companies posted record revenues simultaneously. One of them — Seers Technology — became the first publicly listed medical AI firm in the country to achieve full-year operating profitability. Another, Lunit, grew its revenue twelvefold in four years and is now embedded in hospitals across more than 50 countries. A third, VUNO, achieved its first-ever profitable quarter. For a sector long defined by promise rather than performance, 2025 marks a decisive inflection point. In short, medical AI in Korea is no longer an experiment. It is a business.
However, most foreign observers still have no idea this is happening. While the global tech press covers Nvidia’s dominance and the AI semiconductor race, a quieter revolution is playing out inside Korean hospital wards, radiology suites, and genomics labs — and the financial returns are starting to flow. This is the story of how Korea’s digital healthcare sector went from regulatory gray zones to record revenue. Furthermore, it explains why 2026 may be the year the world finally takes notice.
The Market Most People Are Still Missing
Before diving into the companies, the market context matters. And the numbers are, frankly, startling.
South Korea’s AI in healthcare market is projected to grow from $0.37 billion in 2023 to $6.67 billion by 2030, according to InvestKOREA data. That represents a compound annual growth rate of 50.8%. Specifically, this exceeds the global average of 41.8% and outpaces even the broader Asian average of 47.9%. In short, Korea is the fastest-growing major AI healthcare market in the world.
Furthermore, the broader Korea digital healthcare industry — including electronic medical records, digital therapeutics, telemedicine platforms, and AI diagnostics — generated approximately ₩6.49 trillion ($4.81 billion) in total domestic revenue in 2023, according to the Korea Digital Health Industry Association. Indeed, that figure has been climbing steeply. By 2026, analysts expect it to breach the $6 billion threshold.
What makes this market particularly interesting for investors is the structural foundation beneath those growth numbers. South Korea operates a universal healthcare system covering all 51 million citizens. Furthermore, its hospital infrastructure is dense, digitally connected, and data-rich. In particular, the country has one of the world’s highest rates of hospital visits per capita — which means an enormous volume of clinical data flowing through the system every day. Consequently, that data is the raw material for medical AI, and Korean companies have been training on it for over a decade.
In addition, the government has committed roughly ₩22 billion ($16 million) to a multimodal medical AI project linking 47 hospitals, while Seoul’s city government separately pledged ₩100 billion over three to five years for AI-driven drug discovery. Meanwhile, medical AI device approvals at the Ministry of Food and Drug Safety surged from 62 cases in 2023 to 108 in 2024 and 157 in 2025 — a 2.5-fold increase in just three years. As of the first quarter of 2026, another 55 approvals had already been granted. These are not hypothetical tailwinds. They are active and accelerating.
For more on Korea’s broader AI ecosystem, see our coverage of Korean AI startups: 3 hidden giants to watch in 2026.
Lunit: From ₩6.6B to ₩83.1B in Four Years
If any single company captures the arc of Korean medical AI, it is Lunit. Founded in Seoul in 2013 with the stated ambition of conquering cancer through AI, the company spent years building clinical evidence while watching its stock price oscillate on the hope of future revenues. In 2021, Lunit generated ₩6.6 billion in total revenue. Four years later, that figure had grown to ₩83.1 billion — a 12-fold increase, and the highest annual figure in the company’s history.
However, the 53% year-over-year jump from 2024 to 2025 was not accidental. It reflected the maturation of two distinct business lines that Lunit has been building simultaneously: imaging diagnostics for hospitals, and biomarker analysis for pharmaceutical companies.
The Imaging Side
Lunit’s flagship diagnostic products — Lunit INSIGHT CXR for chest X-rays and Lunit INSIGHT MMG for mammography — are now deployed in hospitals and cancer screening programs across more than 50 countries. Specifically, these tools use deep learning to flag potential lesions with a speed and consistency that outperforms manual review in controlled studies. Moreover, they integrate directly into existing hospital radiology workflows, which removes one of the biggest barriers to adoption: the need for IT infrastructure overhaul.
In May 2025, Lunit and Coreline Soft secured contracts in Germany to deploy AI across large-scale cancer screening programs. Lunit’s five-year partnership with Starvision Service involves installations across 79 sites — a type of long-term, recurring revenue contract that changes the financial character of the business entirely.
The Pharma Side
However, the more strategically significant growth is coming from a different direction: pharmaceutical partnerships. Lunit’s SCOPE platform analyzes tumor tissue images using AI to predict how patients may respond to specific cancer drugs. This is valuable to pharmaceutical companies running oncology trials — they need biomarker data to identify which patients are most likely to respond to their treatments. As a result, Lunit is effectively selling AI-powered clinical trial intelligence to some of the world’s largest drug companies.
In 2025, Lunit signed deals with AstraZeneca to develop an AI-powered pathology solution for non-small cell lung cancer, and with Daiichi Sankyo to integrate SCOPE into two oncology drug candidates in development. Meanwhile, Lunit integrated its platform into Roche Diagnostics’ digital pathology ecosystem — giving it distribution reach across thousands of hospital labs globally. As a result, pharmaceutical revenue more than doubled year-over-year.
The Microsoft Partnership
The most consequential development of 2026 is not yet visible in the revenue figures. In April 2026, Lunit announced that a medical AI platform co-developed with Microsoft will launch in the second quarter. The partnership addresses one of the most persistent problems in medical AI: models trained on patient data from one region often perform poorly when deployed elsewhere. Lunit and Microsoft are jointly developing a Foundation Model Service — built on Azure — that allows individual hospitals to fine-tune Lunit’s AI using their own patient data. Upfront payments and milestone revenues from the partnership are expected to contribute meaningfully to 2026 sales.
Furthermore, Lunit has set a target of increasing revenue by 40 to 50 percent in 2026 while cutting costs by approximately 20 percent through operational efficiencies — a combination that would finally move the company to EBITDA profitability after years of investment-stage losses. For investors, that pivot from top-line growth to earnings discipline is exactly the signal they have been waiting for.
VUNO: 11 Consecutive Quarters of Revenue Growth
While Lunit dominates the headlines, VUNO tells an equally important story about a different slice of the Korea digital healthcare opportunity: AI for critical care monitoring.
Founded in 2014, VUNO holds the distinction of building Korea’s first approved AI-based medical device. Its flagship product in 2025 and 2026 is VUNO Med-DeepCARS — an AI system that monitors patients’ vital signs in general hospital wards and predicts the risk of in-hospital cardiac arrest within the next 24 hours. By October 2025, DeepCARS had been installed across more than 50,000 hospital beds in Korea, including over 20 tertiary hospitals.
Meanwhile, the company’s financials tell a story of disciplined progress. VUNO posted ₩34.8 billion in revenue for 2025, up 34.4% year-over-year, and its operating loss narrowed to ₩4.9 billion — placing it close to break-even. More tellingly, the company achieved its first-ever profitable quarter in Q3 2025, recording ₩10.8 billion in revenue and ₩1.0 billion in operating profit. Moreover, cumulative revenue for the first three quarters of 2025 already exceeded the full-year 2024 total, meaning the company is growing faster than its annual plans.
The Global Expansion Play
VUNO’s international ambitions are grounded in regulatory progress rather than marketing. The company has secured CE-MDR certification in the European Union for DeepCARS, and has begun pilot programs with European partner hospitals in Germany. In the United States, the company is pursuing FDA clearance and has presented at major critical care conferences, while establishing strategic partnerships with US hospital systems to accelerate market entry.
In addition, a noteworthy transaction in early 2026 illustrates VUNO’s confidence in its global trajectory. The company transferred its VUNO Med-LungCT product line to Coreline Soft for ₩3.4 billion — not as a distressed sale, but as a strategic decision to sharpen focus on DeepCARS and cardiac monitoring, where its market position is strongest. Notably, this kind of portfolio rationalization is characteristic of companies transitioning from startup mode to operational maturity.
Seers Technology: The Company That Proved It Was Possible
The most symbolically important development in Korea’s medical AI sector in 2025 did not come from Lunit or VUNO. It came from a company that most people outside Korea have never heard of: Seers Technology.
Seers — which has since rebranded to SEERS — builds wearable AI diagnostic monitoring systems for hospital inpatients. Its core products are mobiCARE, a wearable ECG device that records cardiac data continuously for 24 hours or longer and uses AI to detect arrhythmias, and thynC, an inpatient monitoring platform that tracks multiple vital signs in real time and issues alerts to clinical staff.
In 2025, Seers reported revenue of ₩48.17 billion, up 495% from approximately ₩8 billion in the prior year. In addition, revenue from thynC alone surged 1,046% year-over-year as hospital adoption accelerated sharply. Furthermore, the company posted operating profit of ₩16.33 billion — the first annual operating profit achieved by any publicly listed medical AI company in Korea. For a sector widely viewed as structurally unable to turn profitable in the near term, this was a watershed moment.
Importantly, the business model is worth examining closely, because it reveals why some medical AI approaches reach profitability faster than others. Seers generates revenue not through one-time device sales but through a subscription and reimbursement-based service model. Specifically, hospitals pay recurring fees to have the thynC platform running across their wards. As of early 2026, the platform has been adopted by 128 hospitals and is installed across more than 12,000 beds in Korea. The company is targeting 30,000 newly installed beds in 2026 alone.
Internationally, Seers is expanding into the Middle East through a partnership with PureHealth — the largest healthcare group in the UAE — which operates hospitals, clinics, insurance, and telemedicine services across the Gulf. The company notes that the Middle East has roughly three times more hypertension patients than Korea, with reimbursement rates approximately four times higher. That arithmetic makes the international opportunity structurally more attractive than the domestic one. Simultaneously, Seers is planning a US market entry in 2026, targeting AI-based cardiac monitoring services.
The Hidden Champions: 3billion, Noul, and JLK
The revenue story in Korea’s medical AI sector extends well beyond the three companies above. In particular, a second tier of companies is growing even faster in percentage terms — and operating in markets that global investors have barely begun to evaluate.
3billion: Rare Disease Genomics at Scale
For instance, Three Billion is a Seoul-based rare disease diagnostics company that uses whole-exome and whole-genome sequencing combined with AI-powered genetic variant interpretation to diagnose rare diseases. In 2025, the company doubled its revenue to ₩11.7 billion — its third consecutive year of more than 100% growth. Revenue has grown from ₩800 million in 2022 to ₩11.7 billion in 2025, a nearly 15-fold increase in three years.
Furthermore, the company’s AI software, GEBRA, is increasingly being offered as a SaaS product internationally, which shifts its revenue model toward recurring subscription income. As global awareness of rare diseases grows — and as whole-genome sequencing costs continue to fall — companies like 3billion are positioned at exactly the intersection of unmet clinical need and falling technology costs.
Noul: Blood Diagnostics with a Global Footprint
Similarly, Noul is an AI-based blood and cancer diagnostics company that reported ₩5.12 billion in revenue in 2025, representing 319% year-over-year growth. The company’s AI tools analyze blood samples for malaria, cancer markers, and other conditions using computer vision and machine learning. Importantly, several of its products have secured global distribution through partnerships that extend its reach beyond Korea — including into Southeast Asia and Africa, where malaria diagnostics represent a particularly high-impact use case.
JLK: Stroke AI Going Global
JLK, meanwhile, focuses on AI for stroke detection and neurological imaging. The company reported ₩3.36 billion in revenue in 2025, up 135.2% year-over-year, and has made multiple FDA submissions in the United States. Stroke detection is a time-critical application where AI can meaningfully reduce the gap between symptom onset and treatment — a use case that carries both strong clinical evidence and compelling economics for hospital buyers.
The Regulatory Tailwind That Changed Everything
One reason Korean medical AI companies are converting momentum into revenue in 2026 is a regulatory framework that has matured dramatically over the past two years.
The Digital Medical Products Act (DMPA), which took effect in January 2025, represents the most significant overhaul of Korea’s medical device regulations in decades. For the first time, AI software medical devices have a dedicated and clearly defined regulatory pathway — separate from conventional medical hardware. The DMPA classifies digital medical products into three categories: digital medical devices, digital-combination pharmaceuticals, and digital medical/health-support devices. This taxonomy removes much of the ambiguity that previously caused companies to spend months — or years — in regulatory limbo over basic product classification questions.
Critically, the DMPA includes a provision specifically designed for AI: pre-approved change management plans allow companies to update their AI algorithms without triggering a full re-approval process, as long as updates remain within pre-defined parameters. In a field where models need continuous improvement from real-world data, this is not a minor bureaucratic detail. It is a fundamental enabler of commercial-scale AI deployment. As a result, AI medical device approvals have surged — from 62 in 2023 to 157 in 2025 — and the pace is accelerating further in 2026.
In addition, Korea’s AI Framework Act — the world’s second AI Act after the EU’s — took effect in January 2026. It defines “high-impact AI” as systems that may significantly affect human life, safety, or fundamental rights, and imposes specific obligations on operators in that category. As a result, for medical AI companies, this introduces new compliance requirements around risk management plans and impact assessments. However, it also signals that Korea intends to be a serious and credible global regulatory player — which matters enormously for companies trying to convince hospitals in Germany, Japan, or the United States to trust their technology.
For more on Korea’s broader tech regulatory environment, see our coverage of Korea’s AX Sprint: the $560M AI commercialization project.
The Investment Case: What Analysts Are Now Saying
The investment narrative around Korean medical AI has shifted meaningfully. For years, fund managers evaluated these companies on regulatory pipeline milestones and clinical study results. Now, as Seers Technology’s profitability proves that certain business models in this sector can generate durable margins, investors are asking a different set of questions: What is the margin structure? What portion of revenue is recurring? How does the company perform outside Korea?
Analysts now see 2026 as a potential inflection point for the sector as a whole. Lunit is targeting EBITDA profitability by year-end. VUNO is approaching break-even. Seers is already profitable and expanding internationally. Furthermore, Korea’s medical AI market is growing at 50.8% CAGR in a global healthcare AI market projected to exceed $187 billion by 2030.
For global investors, the practical entry points vary. Lunit and VUNO trade on Korea’s KOSDAQ exchange, providing direct equity exposure to the sector’s two most commercially validated players. Seers trades on the same exchange, with a stock that rose sharply in 2025 — prompting a 200% bonus share issue in early 2026 to improve trading liquidity. Additionally, companies like 3billion offer exposure to the rare disease genomics subsector, which operates on a different growth curve entirely.
However, it is worth acknowledging the risks alongside the opportunity. Reimbursement remains the critical bottleneck for broader adoption. In practice, Korean insurers and the National Health Insurance Service move slowly in approving coverage for AI diagnostic tools — and without reimbursement, hospital procurement decisions remain budget-constrained. Similarly, global expansion into the US and EU requires navigating FDA and CE regulatory processes that take time and capital. However, these are solvable problems that require patience from investors accustomed to faster cycles.
Furthermore, the competitive landscape is evolving. Global players including GE HealthCare, Philips, and Siemens Healthineers are all investing heavily in AI diagnostics. Korean companies hold structural advantages in cost, data richness, and speed of iteration — but sustaining those advantages at global scale is a different challenge than winning in the domestic market.
What Foreign Companies Need to Know
For international healthcare technology companies considering Korea as a market or partnership destination, the DMPA has created a more navigable entry path than existed before. The pre-consultation system now allows companies to engage with the Ministry of Food and Drug Safety early in the development process — before formal submission — to get regulatory guidance on classification and approval pathways. This significantly reduces the risk of investing in market preparation only to discover a product requires re-engineering for the Korean context.
In addition, the government’s multimodal medical AI initiative — which links 47 hospitals into a shared data infrastructure — represents a potential pilot environment for foreign companies seeking real-world clinical validation in an Asian market. Korea is actively seeking international collaboration, and US firms are being specifically encouraged to engage with Korean hospital systems during the current 2026 “transition year” as the telemedicine law comes into force.
For more on how foreign companies can access Korea’s innovation ecosystem, see our guide to starting a business in Korea in 2026.
The Road Ahead: Three Things to Watch
The Korea digital healthcare story in 2026 and beyond will be shaped by three developments that are worth tracking closely.
Reimbursement expansion. The single biggest driver of domestic revenue growth for all these companies is National Health Insurance coverage decisions. Specifically, when the NHIS adds an AI diagnostic tool to its coverage list, hospital adoption accelerates dramatically — because the financial burden shifts from hospitals to the insurance system. Each new coverage decision is therefore a revenue catalyst that can meaningfully move company financials in a single quarter.
US market entry. In parallel, several Korean medical AI companies are simultaneously pursuing FDA clearance and building commercial teams in the United States. The first to achieve meaningful US revenue — not just a pilot contract, but recurring commercial revenue — will likely unlock a significant re-rating from investors. Lunit’s Microsoft partnership is arguably the most credible US pathway currently in play.
The genomics acceleration. 3billion’s 103% annual growth for three consecutive years suggests that AI-powered rare disease genomics may be the fastest-growing subsector within Korean medical AI. Moreover, as whole-genome sequencing costs continue to fall and the global patient community for rare diseases organizes more effectively, companies with proven AI interpretation software and clinical validation could see demand accelerate sharply. This is still early-stage, but the trajectory is compelling.
