10 Most Innovative Asian AI Startups - Part 2
By Terry Bu | 05 Oct, 2025

These Asian-founded startups introduce AI use cases that boggle the imagination and stretch the limits of socially acceptable uses.

Here are numbers 4 through 6 of the 10 AI startups founded by Asian leaders putting AI technology to fascinating uses likely to have groundbreaking impact on various industries.  Some also illustrate the societal risks and challenges that AI development is likely to pose in coming years.

Supertone founder Professor Kyogu Lee.

4. Supertone

Supertone (https://www.supertone.ai) is a South Korean AI startup founded in 2020 to offer innovative voice technology that expands the boundaries of creativity in entertainment and media.  They aim to help human creators in areas like singing voice synthesis, real-time speech enhancement and natural speech synthesis.  Use cases include creating a new AI voice for a brand that sounds perfectly human or converting an existing celebrity’s voice into various languages for global content translation without having to rely on the original celebrity.

One of Supertone's most interesting use cases is “voice resurrection” of dead artists and musicians by combining AI technology and training it to sing in a voice similar to the deceased artist by training the machine learning model using existing audio tracks over thousands of sessions.  Supertone sets the tone for the future of AI voice creation and takes us a long way from the beginnings of Siri and Alexa.  In late 2022 Supertone was acquired by HYBE, the Korean entertainment and music industry giant responsible for launching BTS and other K-Pop groups. 

I gave the voice model a try on Supertone's website with the text-to-speech capability.  Any text you type can then be spoken by voices that can be adjusted for various tones and characters ranging from those reminiscent of Japanese anime characters to serious professional voice actors.   Expressing deep concern for “Responsible AI” the site states, “When utilizing voice synthesis technology, Supertone protects the rights of individuals and characters, and only use such voices with explicit consent.”

CEO Kyogu Lee is currently a professor of machine learning at South Korea’s Seoul University and an alumnus of Stanford University.  

Ambient AI co-founder and CEO Shikhar Shrestha

5. Ambient.ai 

Ambient.ai applies AI-powered computer vision to video for real-time threat detection for premises security.   Use cases include enterprise & campus security, contextual threat detection (behavioral signatures, anomaly detection), false-alarm reduction and automated dispatching. Ambient's technology is used by Fortune 500 companies as well as being deployed at scale across US campuses. 

Ambient.ai was co-founded by Shikhar Shrestha and Vikesh Khanna in 2016 in Redwood City, California.  The company raised about $165 million in funding from investors including Andreessen Horowitz and Allegion Ventures.   Shrestha shares a video in which he recalls having been a robbery victim as a boy of 12.   He later asked himself while studying at Stanford, “What if AI could detect signs early and prevent incidents in a way that exceeds current human capabilities?”

He’s doing exactly that with Ambient AI’s real-time threat detection and paving the way for the future of incident prevention in which AI can trigger intervention before crimes can even happen.  

Ferrum Health CEO Pelu Tran

6. Ferrum Health 

Ferrum Health is a healthcare AI platform that essentially enables healthcare systems to securely deploy, manage, and scale artificial intelligence applications. The platform, designed to simplify and accelerate the adoption of AI, acts as a central hub, integrating with existing systems and running multiple AI algorithms across different clinical departments.

Ferrum Health’s website (https://ferrumhealth.com/) showcases many appealing benefits such as having the option to leverage a private, on-premises or hybrid-cloud hub architecture, ensuring that sensitive patient data remains within the client’s health system's firewall. The AI processing occurs locally using de-identified data to mitigate privacy and security risks and maintain HIPAA compliance, compared to 3rd party vendors where you might have to expose patient data to the public cloud for AI processing to occur. F

errum Health was founded in 2017 by Pelu Tran and Kenneth Ko.