Regional AX Bridge @ Korea 2026
Designated an innovation product last month and now at the contracting stage, with sales in Indonesia and the UAE… exhibiting at Regional AX Bridge @ Korea, Oct. 13-14 at COEX
The Ministry of Science and ICT (과학기술정보통신부) and the National IT Industry Promotion Agency (정보통신산업진흥원, NIPA) hold the first Regional AX Bridge @ Korea (지역 AX 브릿지@KOREA) on Oct. 13 and 14 at COEX THE PLATZ (코엑스 더플랏츠) in Seoul.
Twenty AI companies headquartered outside the capital region will run booths and hold one-on-one meetings with overseas buyers and adopting institutions, and the opening ceremony carries a contract and MOU signing session. The companies were selected in July and are going through diagnostics and commercialization consulting; a participant session was held in Gangnam, Seoul on Aug. 28.
Among the 20 exhibitors, pixelRo (픽셀로) of Daegu is running overseas sales and domestic procurement in parallel. It entered Korean public procurement for the first time this year. Its AI eye-health self-screening solution was designated an innovation product last month and listed on the public Innovation Marketplace, and the company has won a tender and is at the contracting stage. The product is also included in the Public Procurement Service's third innovation-product pilot purchase round of 2026, which covers 74 products and 120 pilot user institutions at a scale of 12.7 billion won (about $9.1 million).
CEO Kang Seok-myung (강석명) said in an Aug. 28 interview that the eight-year-old company builds eye-health and early screening devices alongside a contact lens service, and described the business as a medical device and digital health company. pixelRo is a spin-off from Samsung Electronics' C-Lab in-house venture program, where it developed the product for a year before separating.
The device will not run until the distance is right… it screens, it does not prescribe
Asked about the AI, Kang said it belongs to the nurse's domain rather than the doctor's: the system sets up the optimal conditions a reliable measurement requires. Vision tests depend on distance, and older users often struggle to keep the right distance or distinguish left eye from right, so the device measures distance and will not operate until the conditions are met, then adds health coaching after the reading.
Asked whether the system makes the call, Kang said it does decide on vision, since it is a diagnostic medical device, but it does not prescribe; prescription belongs to the doctor. He put the device in the lower end of Class II. According to the exhibitor profile, the product provides near and distance vision tests, presbyopia and macular degeneration checks, cataract screening and eye exercises, with blood pressure and grip strength measurement attached. Applied technologies include automatic real-time distance measurement, left–right eye separation and eye tracking. In a January trade report, the company said real-time gaze tracking and eye separation improve accuracy and that the device automatically corrects for test conditions and gaze.
Real volume in Indonesia and the UAE… now Japan and procurement
The company has sold samples into Indonesia, Dubai, India, Australia and Canada. Kang said Indonesia produced real sales and the UAE also bought. Interest now, he said, is concentrated in Japan, alongside Southeast Asia and public procurement.
In January it exhibited at CES 2026 with a self-screening solution for older users, and said the show had helped it widen overseas partnerships and export cooperation across North America, the Middle East and Asia.
Meeting distributors and hospital chains at COEX in October
pixelRo is one of 20 regional AI companies exhibiting at Regional AX Bridge @ Korea (지역 AX 브릿지@KOREA) on Oct. 13 and 14 at COEX THE PLATZ in Seoul. Its stated matching targets are medical device distributors in Southeast Asia, the Middle East and Eastern Europe, hospital and pharmacy chains, and companies with government procurement networks. It was founded in 2020 and is based in Buk-gu, Daegu.
Inside the Regional AX Bridge program pixelRo joined… diagnostics and consulting after the July selection… NIPA offers to connect exhibitors to its overseas offices
The counterparts pixelRo is looking for are medical device distributors in Southeast Asia, the Middle East and Eastern Europe, hospital and pharmacy chains, and companies with government procurement networks — the same two tracks, Japan and Southeast Asia on one side and public procurement on the other, that Kang named in the interview.
Applications for Regional AX Bridge @ Korea closed on July 3, and selections were notified on July 13 after a document review. Selected companies went through two weeks of in-person diagnostics from July 24 to Aug. 3 and five weeks of commercialization consulting from Aug. 25 to Sept. 29. Consulting covers market-entry strategy, investment positioning, IR materials and contract and intellectual property review, and the per-company assignments repeat items that surface at the point of overseas entry: global commercialization, English-language standard contracts, and regulatory approvals. A separate market-viability test ran through September, and buyer invitations and meeting matrices were circulated from Sept. 7 to Oct. 2.
At the Aug. 28 participant session, Jung Su-jin (정수진), a director general at the National IT Industry Promotion Agency (정보통신산업진흥원, NIPA), said: "NIPA has bases abroad — Silicon Valley, New York, Singapore, Vietnam, the UAE in the Middle East, and India," adding that because the companies want to go global, the agency would connect them to those offices so they could meet good partners there. She also noted that global market entry came up repeatedly in the companies' consulting topics.