UWB (Ultra-Wideband) convergence component specialist freegrow (CEO Kim Young-sik), headquartered in Busan, has been selected in the advanced manufacturing category of the Ministry of SMEs and Startups’ “2026 Super-Gap Startup Project (DIPS; DeepTech Incubating Program for Startups).”

The Super-Gap Startup Project is a program of the Ministry of SMEs and Startups that selects deep-tech startups in six strategic industries, including AI, robotics, and advanced manufacturing, and supports them for up to three years in technology advancement and commercialization. It aims to discover promising companies possessing unrivaled DeepTech and foster them into global unicorns. In the advanced manufacturing category, six companies nationwide were selected, and the agreement period is 34 months, through December 2028.

UWB is a wireless communication technology that uses a wide frequency band to enable ultra-precise indoor location tracking at a level of 10–30 cm. It has strengths in metal-dense industrial sites where Bluetooth and GPS cannot provide accurate coverage.

freegrow is a deep-tech company that designs and manufactures UWB convergence components in-house from the component stage, rather than combining imported modules. In environments densely packed with metal structures, radio waves are generally reflected in all directions, increasing positioning errors. freegrow developed a proprietary algorithm that distinguishes between reflected signals and direct reception signals to solve this problem and stated that it achieves a measured precision of 10–30 cm. It added that it has also independently developed an automatic calibration technology that reduces installation costs to about one-fifth compared with existing foreign systems.

Under this DIPS project, the company plans to expand its proprietary hardware, which integrates UWB, GPS-RTK, and IMU into a single terminal, to cover all land and sea sections. In marine sections, on-device AI will autonomously record process events and then synchronize them upon port berthing, thereby ensuring data continuity across the entire logistics process. Here, UWB refers to Ultra-Wideband, GPS-RTK to GPS-Real Time Kinematic, and IMU to Inertial Measurement Unit.

Meanwhile, freegrow is a Busan-based deep-tech startup founded by a master’s-level science and engineering graduate, and holds seven registered patents and five patent applications.

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