AXE Ventures Invests in Sentinel DeepActive After Seven Months of Live-Account Verification

"An investment decision made by running it in the real market" — AXE Ventures invested after about seven months of verification in a live brokerage account

AXE Ventures (CEO Taehoon Kang), an early-stage technology investor, announced on May 8 that it has invested in Sentinel DeepActive (CEO Lee Jun), a financial AI startup. Rather than relying on document review and backtests alone, AXE Ventures verified the company's AI model by running it in a live brokerage account for roughly seven months before committing capital.

From September 2025 to April 2026, AXE Ventures tested Sentinel DeepActive's investment AI in a live account at a Korean brokerage through an API integration. Because every trade, fill price, and fee is recorded inside a third party's systems, inflating returns or cherry-picking favorable periods is structurally impossible — an environment in which the firm confirmed how the model actually behaves in the market and what its risk profile looks like. "This was an investment decision made by running the model in the real market, not by reading materials," a spokesperson for AXE Ventures said.

Sentinel AI, the company's proprietary financial AI, is a foundation model built end to end in house — from model architecture to training methodology and infrastructure. It performs daily active rebalancing across financial assets including individual stocks, ETFs, and commodities. The company plans to scale its transformer-based model from 2 billion parameters today to 15 billion by 2027 and to expand its investment universe from 15 assets to more than 300.

Sentinel DeepActive is developing the Sentinel AI retirement-pension robo-advisor, targeting a 2027 launch subject to obtaining the relevant licenses and passing Korea's robo-advisor test-bed review. Designed with real-time feedback, a self-learning architecture, and once-daily rebalancing to respond to volatile downturns, the product is aimed at the retirement-pension market, where stable management is essential. The company recently raised KRW 1.1 billion in a strategic direct investment from Hyundai Motor Securities, bringing its cumulative funding to more than KRW 4 billion. AXE Ventures committed KRW 500 million to the same round before Hyundai Motor Securities invested, helping bring the round together.

"Sentinel DeepActive is proving that AI can move beyond summarizing information and directly manage capital to deliver performance," the spokesperson added. "Building on real-market validation in a third-party environment and the founder's technical depth, we will support the company across its entire growth path after the investment, jointly managing assets under management, returns, and risk metrics as core KPIs."

Sentinel DeepActive is an AI asset-management startup founded in June 2023 by CEO Lee Jun, a patent attorney with 14 years of experience specializing in AI. In 2025, the company graduated third overall from the 16th Kibo Venture CAMP and was named a top-performing company upon completing Korea's Early-Stage Startup Package. It is currently carrying out projects under the general TIPS program and the Startup Scale-Up Package. Quantitative results from live trading will be disclosed in accordance with disclosure standards after the company passes the robo-advisor test-bed review operated by Koscom.