Salted (CEO Cho Hyung-jin, pictured), a digital healthcare company, won the Minister of SMEs and Startups Award at the "2026 Korea Startup Culture Awards" hosted by Seoul Economic Daily. Salted was recognized for commercializing a solution that measures gait and physical functions using smart insoles and analyzes them based on artificial intelligence (AI), leading the popularization of digital healthcare and contributing to building a precision medicine ecosystem.
Founded in 2015, Salted is a spin-off company from the first cohort of Samsung Electronics' in-house venture program C-Lab. Under the vision that "turning all movement in the world into data can make human life more valuable," CEO Cho has built technological capabilities by independently advancing smart insoles, sensor devices, data analysis platforms, and AI algorithms. In its early days, the company entered the digital sports market by unveiling the world's first smart golf shoe, "IOFIT." IOFIT won an Innovation Award at CES, the world's largest IT and electronics exhibition hosted by the Consumer Technology Association (CTA), and the Health & Fitness Gold Award at ISPO, the world's largest sporting goods exhibition, gaining recognition for both its technological prowess and business viability. Building on the sensor technology and motion data analysis capabilities accumulated in the sports field, the company later expanded its business into digital healthcare. The starting point was a problem awareness about the asymmetry of information that forces reliance on visual assessments by medical staff or expensive equipment when analyzing physical functions such as gait.
Salted's core product, "NeuroGate," places highly durable pressure sensors inside thin insoles to measure users' weight distribution, gait cycle, and ground contact time in ultra-precise units. The collected raw data is transmitted to a mobile application via Bluetooth, and through Salted's own proprietary algorithm, it visualizes gait asymmetry, left-right balance, and stride length. This can be used as a powerful supplementary indicator that allows medical professionals to objectively assess a patient's condition. NeuroGate entered the healthcare market in earnest in 2021 after receiving Class 1 medical device approval from the Ministry of Food and Drug Safety, and has since been adopted by more than 50 medical institutions in Korea. Clinical research on degenerative brain diseases such as Parkinson's disease and on diabetic neuropathy is also actively underway with leading domestic medical institutions including Seoul National University Hospital and Seoul St. Mary's Hospital. It is assessed to be in high demand in medical fields whose importance is growing in an aging era, including recovery assessment after artificial joint surgery, confirmation of gait changes in patients with spinal disorders, observation of rehabilitation progress in stroke patients, evaluation of gait abnormalities in Parkinson's disease patients, and assessment of sarcopenia and fall risk.
Salted is not stopping at device development but is focusing on building data-based infrastructure that can repeatedly verify changes in patients' functions in clinical settings, through vertical integration encompassing sensors, medical devices, data platforms, biosignal analysis algorithms, and AI interpretation solutions. Its strategy of expanding the use of human motion data into the medical, sports, and robotics industries has also earned the trust of investors, attracting cumulative investment of 15 billion won to date. This year, the company selected Samsung Securities as its IPO underwriter and is preparing for an initial public offering (IPO) targeting 2028.
