Ken Kim

Scanning the world into a computer

Ken Kim runs a company built on a deceptively simple idea: walk through a space with a phone, and come out the other side with a full digital replica of it. That is the promise behind 3i Inc., the Seoul-based spatial AI company he co-founded in 2017 and still leads as CEO. Its enterprise platform, Beamo, turns ordinary photos and 360-degree footage into 3D digital twins in minutes. Its consumer product, Pivo, is a smart pod that recognizes and follows a person, letting a single creator film like they have a camera crew.

The two products look unrelated - one sells to global enterprises running facility inspections, the other to influencers making videos. But for Kim they answer the same question he has been chasing his whole career: how do you make capturing the physical world effortless? "3i aims to transform the way the physical world interacts with the digital world," runs the company line, and Kim has spent more than two decades trying to close that gap.

He likes to frame it against something everyone already understands. Google mapped the outdoors with Street View, he points out, but the inside of buildings stayed dark. "Maps and street views were used to digitalize outdoor space, which wasn't the case for indoor space," Kim has said. "But now an easy and speedy creation of a digital twin for indoor space is achievable via 3i's AI technology." That is the wedge - the enormous, un-mapped interior world of warehouses, data centers, hospitals and factories.

From a taken-apart camera to a spatial company

The obsession started young. At age 10, Kim took apart his father's camera just to see how it worked. That curiosity followed him for decades and, by 2005, had turned into serious panoramic photography work - stitching wide, immersive images long before "spatial computing" was a phrase anyone used. Born in Seoul, he later lived across the United States and traveled to more than 20 countries, and today he splits his time between San Jose, California and Seoul.

His path into technology was not a straight line. Kim started out as a trader at E1, a Korean energy and commodities firm. He moved into IT as a senior consultant at G-Tech, then became general manager at a business consulting company, OCB. Before 3i, he ran YouVR (formerly NextAeon), a VR cloud platform - his first company built squarely around immersive media. In 2017, the year he co-founded 3i, he also went through the entrepreneurship program at Draper University in Silicon Valley.

Put those pieces together and the through-line is clear. The trader learned markets. The consultant learned enterprise buyers. The VR founder learned immersive capture. 3i is where all three converge: a company that sells a hard technical capability - turning space into data - to both businesses and everyday creators.

Building for the "metaverse" without the hype

When 3i raised its money in 2021, the language of the moment was the metaverse, and Kim used it. "The metaverse is the next-generation platform, where soon, all media flows are expected to move," he said at the time. "Our products and solutions help enterprises and content creators leap onto the metaverse much more easily, seamlessly, and quickly than ever before." But strip away the buzzword and what 3i actually ships is grounded and measurable - digital twins accurate enough for real inspections, with Kim happy to quote the error rates himself: "The error rate is around 5% from a 20-meter distance, and about 1% from a 5-meter distance."

That precision is what turns a neat demo into a business. 3i has signed enterprise partnerships - including with Japanese carrier NTT, where digital facility management was projected to save tens of billions of won a year - and reported explosive early growth, including a 420% jump in annual revenue in 2020. From the start the company was built to sell globally, generating the large majority of its revenue outside Korea and assembling a team that today spans more than 29 nationalities and holds dozens of technology patents.

Two products, one thesis

Kim's decision to run both a B2B platform and a B2C device under one roof is unusual, and deliberate. Beamo is the enterprise engine: capture a site once, and teams anywhere can walk it remotely, run inspections, maintain equipment and collaborate inside a shared digital copy. "We designed Beamo to capture the essence of a space for people to come together and collaborate from anywhere in the world," Kim has said. Pivo, meanwhile, put 3i's computer-vision and tracking know-how into the hands of millions of everyday creators, building brand, data and hardware muscle that feeds back into the harder enterprise work.

For Kim, both come back to the same belief: that capturing space should feel as natural as taking a photo - the exact thing that fascinated a 10-year-old with a screwdriver and his father's camera. The technology behind it has gotten dramatically harder since then. The instinct has not changed at all.

What's next

3i has been pushing its digital twin work into new territory, including sustainability - the company showcased Beamo at the 2024 Carbon Neutral EXPO, pitching digital twins as tools to run facilities more efficiently and cut emissions. As spatial AI, robotics and computer vision converge, Kim's bet is that the ability to reliably turn any physical place into usable digital data becomes infrastructure, not novelty. He has spent his whole life taking the world apart to understand it. Now he is trying to hand everyone else the same ability - minus the screwdriver.