We raised our pre-seed round

The news

On May 19, 2026, we announced that orbt raised its pre-seed round, led by Mashup Ventures, one of Korea’s earliest and most respected early-stage funds. We are not disclosing the amount. What it buys, we will: more time, a wider network in North America, and the room to work with more brands.

We are a small team, so this is a real milestone for us. Rather than post a one-line announcement and move on, we want to tell you the whole story, because most of it is more useful than the headline.

Who backed us, and why it matters to us

Mashup Ventures has been writing first checks to Korean founders since 2013. It was started by Taekkyung Lee, a co-founder of Daum, and its portfolio includes companies a lot of Koreans use every day: Bucketplace, the company behind the interior app Ohouse; the travel platform MyRealTrip; the business-contacts app Remember; and the AI lab ScatterLab. The fund writes early and follows the companies that work. An early yes from a fund like that is a signal we do not take lightly.

The deal was led by Seungkuk Lee, a partner at the firm. His reason, in his words:

“orbt provides AI consulting that offers practical solutions for global brand expansion.”

Seungkuk Lee, Partner, Mashup Ventures

He pointed to two things in particular: our founder’s experience in the consumer-brand market, and the network we have built on the ground in the US and Europe. That is the part we care about most. The fund did not bet on a demo. It bet on whether we can actually help a brand cross a border, which is the only thing we are trying to be good at.

How we got here

orbt started in 2025. Before orbt, our CEO, Joshua Kim, led the Korea launch of the social app BeReal, so he had already spent years on the specific problem of taking a consumer product into a new market. The first version of orbt was not what it is now. We began by building AI for due diligence on small and legacy businesses, and we kept following the problem until it led us to a clearer one: the brands that need real strategy the most are the ones priced out of it. A top-tier consulting engagement runs into six and seven figures and lands as a single deck, once. Most growing brands cannot buy that, and even the ones that can get a snapshot that is out of date by the time it is delivered.

Two moments turned that idea into something we could show people.

Meet the Drapers. We were selected for season 7 of Meet the Drapers, the pitch competition run by the Draper family of investors. We were the first Korean team ever picked for the show, and the youngest, and we finished in the global top four of the AI category. It was the first time a room of investors outside Korea told us the idea was worth something. You can watch our pitch.

A US supplement brand. Then we ran a short paid pilot with a US supplement company, a daily strategy brief through its rebrand, and its sales roughly doubled around the relaunch. We are careful about the credit there: the brand was rebranding at the same time, and that did real work too, so we cannot cleanly separate our share. What the briefs added was a steady stream of moves the team could act on, like the retention play they went on to build. The honest version is in the full case study.

What orbt actually does

orbt is an AI growth strategist for consumer brands. It reads your market every day and hands your team a few clear moves each week, in Slack. Three parts do the work. Signal reads roughly two dozen live sources daily and filters the noise down to what matters for your brand. Strategy runs a panel of specialist agents whose findings get fact-checked before anything reaches you, because AI that sounds right and is wrong is the default failure of this technology, not the edge case. Memory, which we call the Customer Brain, remembers every finding and decision, so the advice gets more specific to your brand over time instead of resetting.

We are also paid on the revenue we help create, so we make more when your brand grows and less when it does not. If you want the long version, with every claim sourced, we wrote it down in the research behind orbt.

What the money is for

The plan is simple. Expand our network in North America so more brands there can reach us, take on more of the brands trying to grow across borders, and keep putting money into the engine and the verification layer that makes it safe to trust. Josh put the standard we are holding ourselves to plainly when the round was announced:

“The value of consulting should be proven not by reports, but by real growth.”

Joshua Kim, CEO, orbt

That is the bar. We would rather be measured by whether the brands we work with actually grow than by how good our decks look.

Thank you

To Mashup Ventures and Seungkuk Lee, for backing an unproven team on an early idea. To the brands who let us work on their business before we had a round to point to. And to everyone reading this who is trying to take a product they believe in into a market that has never heard of it: that is the exact problem we get up for. If that is you, come talk to us, or try orbt free.