Post by LUKAS Chang

Korean is now the fastest-growing language in U.S. universities — up 78% since 2016 (MLA). Half a million Americans took TOPIK last year. And the App Store still doesn't have an AI tutor built for the actual exam. That gap is why we built TOPIKBOT. A few observations from running an EdTech company across Seoul and Hanoi over the last four years. First, the "free language app" market is saturated. The "passes a national exam" market is not. Duolingo can teach you to order coffee. It cannot get you through TOPIK II's 5,000-word active vocabulary or the seven formality levels of Korean grammar. Second, Korean learners outside Korea are remarkably underserved at the high-intent end. A Stanford student preparing for a Seoul internship has exactly the same problem as a Hanoi student preparing for a Korean university entrance — no AI tool built on the actual exam corpus exists. Third, the infrastructure problem is solvable, but only by a Korean team. Foreign LLM teams can produce grammatically correct Korean. They cannot produce Korean that matches the cultural register a TOPIK grader expects. We have spent four years building that distinction. What LUKAS has shipped so far: • TOPIKBOT — AI trained on every TOPIK exam released since 1997 • 3 Korean government patents (Nos. 2545629, 2774742, 2909344) • 2025 Korean Ministry of Culture Grand Prize • MOUs with 12+ universities including Peking University • Live in 40+ countries, free at the entry tier Where we're going next. We are now opening the U.S. market — initially through free game-based access at game.topikbot.kr — and beginning conversations with U.S. universities offering Korean Studies programs, Korean cultural centers, and K-content communities serving learners who have outgrown beginner apps. If you teach Korean, run a study-abroad program, lead a K-content community, or invest in language EdTech — I would welcome a conversation. — Jinmin Jang CEO, LUKAS Edutainment Seoul · Hanoi #KoreanLanguage #EdTech #AI #TOPIK #KoreanStudies #LanguageLearning