Heimdex Selected for Korea's 2026 TIPS Program to Build On-Premises Video AI That Understands How Things Relate
Heimdex, a Korean startup building video search and editing AI that never requires uploading footage, has been selected for the general track of TIPS, a government-backed startup program run by the Ministry of SMEs and Startups, the company said Wednesday. Samsung Fire & Marine Insurance, which operates the program as an investor, recommended the company.
Today's video AI can find a scene with "a person holding a red cup." It can't answer "Who handed it to whom, and why?" Under the TIPS project, Heimdex will develop technology that stores the relationships among people, objects and actions across multiple videos, then answers questions like that one with the supporting scenes attached.
Heimdex's enterprise product analyzes video where it already lives, on local drives, network-attached storage (NAS) or external hard disks, rather than sending it to an outside server. A user types a description of the scene they want, and the software returns the matching file and its position on the timeline. The same tool produces section-by-section summaries, assembles short-form clips automatically, and blurs faces and other personal information.
The company also runs heimlog, a service for individual creators. A user drops in footage from a trip, and heimlog picks the highlights and stitches them into a vlog. It generates captions, adds background music, and blurs the faces of passersby. Finished videos can be posted straight to YouTube.
Heimdex plans to go further. With rights holders' consent, it intends to process the organized footage and distribute it as AI training data. The relationship-tracking technology being built under the TIPS project would serve as the foundation, turning people, objects and actions in video into structured data.
Founded in 2025, Heimdex has raised an early-stage investment from Antler Korea and a pre-seed investment from Samsung Fire & Marine. This year it has also been selected for the ministry's Didimdol R&D program, the investment-linked startup support program under Gwangju's Startup City initiative, and Kibo Venture Camp's 18th cohort, where it was named a top-performing company. It also joined N-Up 2026, a program run by the ministry and Nvidia.
"Until now, video AI has stopped at finding individual scenes," said Hee-jo Kang , Heimdex co-founder and chief strategy officer. "We want to build a system that records the relationships between scenes, so search and analysis get more accurate as the video library grows."
