AI startup Waddle announced on the 23rd that it has established a US subsidiary, Waddle Labs, in San Francisco to accelerate its global expansion with its AI growth agent "Gentoo." Co-founder Cho Yong-won will serve as CEO of the US entity.
Waddle won first place among 93 global teams at the OpenAI GPT-5 Hackathon held in San Francisco in August last year. Since launching Gentoo on the US Shopify App Store in September, the company has signed paid contracts with approximately 10 American brands in San Francisco and Los Angeles.
The global version of Gentoo functions as an "AI shopping mall operator." It uses digital clones—virtual customers built from user conversation data accumulated in Korea—to diagnose and improve factors hindering purchase conversion across e-commerce sites. The solution replaces shopping mall operations teams and agencies while boosting e-commerce sales. Four e-commerce companies that adopted Gentoo saw their average monthly transaction volume increase by more than 35% after four months.
Building on these results, Waddle plans to aggressively target e-commerce companies in the US market. The company will expand local partnerships by positioning Gentoo as an action-oriented AI agent focused on actual sales conversion and order growth, rather than a simple chatbot.
"After the OpenAI hackathon last year, we gained confidence that Gentoo's technology is competitive on the global stage," said Cho Yong-won, CEO of Waddle Labs. "This led to rapid business expansion, including actual contracts in the US. We will continue to optimize our AI architecture for the American market and provide practical support for global e-commerce operators' revenue growth."