Kyobo Life Insurance, Korea’s third largest life insurer, Wednesday announced it will foster startups in the healthcare sector as part of its open innovation strategy dubbed Innostage to find new business opportunities.

The insurer already selected five startups in 10 business categories for the program. The other five will be selected by the end of this year. Futureplay, a local startup accelerator, will join to help the startups develop their business plan.

Specific areas for technology development targeted by the startups include products and services that reward healthy lifestyle behaviors, such as a smart toothbrush to enable dental care and connectivity with insurers, a system to help improve eating habits based on big data analytics, a morning food recommendation and delivery service based on individuals’ lifestyle data and an online parent coaching with psychology data from parents and children.

Kyobo Life will cover expenses of the selected startups residing in Futureplay’s incubator facility and provide them with research grants. Kyobo Life will also build a system for app development based on open APIs and cloud protocols.

The insurer will pick two to three viable products or services from the startups at the end of this year to launch a commercial app designed to improve health and wellbeing, starting next year.

Kyobo Life will build a healthcare platform with the program and evolve it into a lifecycle management platform to offer new digital insurance services, said Yoon Yeol-hyun, CEO of Kyobo Life Insurance.

By Lee Seung-hoon and Minu Kim

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