This is one of the achievements of our team since we clearly suggest a fundraising model suitable for the Korean environment. We wish our trials and success could be a lesson and encourage the participation of other new teams in Korea.

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Funding campaign



Without doubt, the most challenging work of the iGEM competition is collecting funds. Although our supervisor, prof. dr. Jang has supported the purchase of required reagents and oligonucleotides, his lab fund was only allowed to use for the research purpose. Thus, we had to gather fees on our own for the participation and the Jamboree before the deadline.

We first started the funding campaign following tips from the iGEM. We contacted Ghent University Global Campus to ask whether it can aid us. However, the answer was negative. As its annual budget was already set, the campus cannot afford to support us. We also asked to borrow facilities for culturing algae, but they refused to help us due to the absence of a principal investigator in the campus. Fortunately, the campus told us to help by connecting experts or institutions. Indeed, they introduced us to prof. dr. ir. Philippe Heynderickx of the Environmental technology department. However, the meeting was another moment of reaffirmation to restrict use of research funds.

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After the failure, we moved our sight to corporate sponsorship. We’ve searched how Korean teams have gathered the money. In fact, all Korean undergraduate teams are concerned with this issue. They mainly paid their fee by themselves. From old posts of previous teams on the research community, we realized that local companies do not believe the research ability of undergraduates. They have applied vigorously but almost all programs rejected their offers. Most research programs have limited applicants to graduate students or higher. In the perspective of efficiency, we concluded applications to the research programs offered by companies are likely to fail without achievement.

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In fact, the crowdfunding is hopeless in Korea. Above all, the charity culture has not been established here yet. We have investigated the former team’s actions, but all of their results were poor, below $50. Although the iGEM is encouraged to use its prestige in fundraising of each team, this is ineffective as the iGEM competition is still not known. We think this poor acknowledgement came from Korean biotech status. As interest in white biotechnology just began to rise in the 2020s, there was no interest in synthetic biology until then.

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However, only few interests in the industry mean its competitiveness as a startup. For these reasons we chose to run into the startup field. Fortunately, Incheon National University passionately has offered many financial support chances to nourish new pre-startup companies of students. We applied to this program and were selected to one of startup clubs.




In the program, there was a moment to present our project in front of judges. We prepared presentation slides to describe our project in a business manner. After presenting our plan, they advised us to emphasize economic advantages rather than realization. We realized big differences of the mindset between entrepreneurs and researchers. They demanded us to consider possibilities and economics of commercialization in relation to current policies, markets and potential competitors. After numerous meetings and investigation, we understood the startup environment in Korea.

For further application to another startup support programs, we need to modify our project plot in more business way. Junyoung Chun took a responsibility for this task. In addition, the most of programs asked us to have a business registration. He, as a CEO, registered it. We felt burdened to register into this at first, as we had fear for the unknown. However, we found that no cost would be asked before monetization, so we did.

Even though we won the support program of Incheon National University, its fund is restricted to use to purchase materials, only for the product realization. For more freedom in finance use, we decided to apply on a larger-scale program, which allows to pay the iGEM competition fee from the support. We sought and applied to the Pre-startup Package program managed by Hanyang University as it was the best offer to our needs. While searching chances, we realized that the authority has invested a lot of resources to startups. In contrast to the public research program, the startup program even opens to undergraduate.

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In the presentation, judges listened our business plan. A funny thing is that nobody has biological knowledge to evaluate our plan. They even had a doubt on the common process of biotech industry in terms of oligonucleotide synthesis; we told that we will order synthesized DNA from other companies for development, and they were worried about dependency of DNA synthesis to other company. Instead of suggesting possibility of commercialization based on our biological knowledge, we instantly changed our tactics to emphasizing secondary characteristics of our team in terms of the likelihood of success. We told how much our members have fancy history, and informed similar biotech unicorns such as Ginkgo Bioworks which applies gene manipulation into their business. We think this was happened from unfamiliarity of our biotech offer, since other offers were mostly related to IT tech or the engineering.

As our tactic probably worked, we were selected to the program. We were able to pay the Jamboree fee through this program support. We reported the purpose of our payment is for business promotion to worldwide potential customers, we were approved to use. In addition, to return our previous individual payment for the participation fee, we legally spent an allowed amount of money as salaries to team members.

However, the application of startup program entails the loss of manpower for research. Every program asked applicants to attend their education sessions, and these are mandatory. Indeed, Chun kept bound to the program so he could not be fully involved into our experiments. In addition, we literally needed “Double Think”. Writing Wiki and Judging form, we had to work additionally to describe our project in the business way to the competition way. Each demanded us to emphasize different parts. Therefore, the sufficient scale of team is recommended to buffer these disadvantages. In despite of disadvantages, the fundraising through startup matches well with the pursuing value of the iGEM competition. The iGEM competition strongly asked teams to their project applicable to real issues. In reality, the economics always engages into issues. The startup fundraising was a chance to concern the application into the real industry. Unless a team privatizes its achievement from the competition. It is a good option to reflect the reality.