Sungjae Hwang

Sungjae Hwang is a serial (and parallel) entrepreneur, investor and inventor. He is a partner of Futureplay, a top-tier start-up accelerator in South Korea and CEO of FoundationX, a accelerator and building platform for blockchain projects. Prior to these companies, he founded several startups. He served as Chief Product Officer at Fluenty Inc., an AI chatbot startup that was acquired by Samsung Electronics in 2017. He is also a co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer at Pium Labs Inc., a New york based IoT startup that is innovating a scent diffuser. He received his Ph.D in the filed of HCI (Human Computer Interaction) from KAIST (Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology). He has published more than 30 papers and field more than 300 patents that introduce novel input techniques for future devices. Several of these inventions have been transferred to top global companies, non-practicing entities and start-ups. At present, more than 30 entities hold his patents and use them in their services and products. Further, his work has been presented at various academic conferences such as the Association for Computing Machinery’s Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, its User Interface Software and Technology Symposium and its Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services. He participated in 30+ ICOs and backed 500+ innovative projects in crowdsourcing plaforms such as Kickstarter and Indiegogo. He has won numerous awards, including the IP Technology Award (2010), the Creative Invention Award (2011) and the IAM world's leading IP strategists 300 (2016). He is also an angel investor and an adviser to various tech start-ups.