SEOUL, South Korea, Nov. 9, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — For startups entering foreign markets, proving their technology and turning it into real business is an uphill battle. They must navigate local regulations, understand market demand and win the trust of companies wary of adopting new technology. CrossHub, a developer of identity verification and payment solutions, is tackling these hurdles by running proofs of concept (PoCs) with overseas partners, building a track record, and converting those references into field deployments and partnerships with financial institutions.
Dongju Kim Team leader of Crosshub
A voice authentication pilot in Singapore’s healthcare sector shows how CrossHub is testing the real-world potential of its technology abroad. This year, the company signed a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) with Singapore’s National Healthcare Group Diagnostics (NHGD) and is currently running a PoC. Last month, it completed an on-site demonstration ahead of the service launch.
In Singapore, patients must state their name and address by voice before seeing a doctor. Until now, staff have manually checked whether the information matched the patient. CrossHub is addressing this with V-Pay, a voice authentication solution that analyzes a speaker’s voice to confirm their identity.
“If this moves to a full contract, we’ll have the opportunity to use voice data from northern Singapore,” said Kim Dong-ju, team lead at CrossHub. “We believe the technology can be applied not only to healthcare but to other industries as well.”
CrossHub is investing heavily in overseas pilots because earning the trust of adopting companies matters as much as technical performance. Businesses considering identity verification technology need proven cases that demonstrate not only accuracy and convenience but also security and data protection. In tightly regulated industries such as finance, a startup’s pitch alone rarely leads to adoption.
“Startups offer innovative technology, but traditional industries are reluctant to adopt it,” Kim explained. “They demand safety and references, so we decided to solve that problem overseas first.”
CrossHub has validated its technology through a range of PoCs with partners including French security firm Thales. Building on that, it has begun collaborating with Korean financial institutions such as Woori Bank, Samsung Card, Woori Card and Hana Bank—leveraging its overseas track record as a foundation for partnerships at home.
The company was born out of the frustrations foreign tourists face with Korea’s digital services. Many major Korean apps require mobile phone-based identity verification, making it difficult for short-term visitors without a Korean phone number to use services such as Kakao T or Baemin. CrossHub set out to solve this by developing passport-based identity verification.
Its core technologies are self-sovereign identity (SSI) and zero-knowledge proofs (ZKP). SSI lets users manage their own identity rather than having personal data stored by individual services, while ZKP allows users to prove a necessary fact without disclosing the underlying personal information. CrossHub combines the two to verify identity while minimizing the storage and exposure of personal data.
The company is now expanding from identity verification into payments and remittances. Travel Pass, an integrated payment and travel platform for foreign visitors to Korea, is being developed with Woori Bank. It aims to help tourists pay for goods and access transportation and tourism services in Korea. In September, CrossHub broadened the service’s reach by signing an integration and sales agreement for transportation and tourism products with Japanese travel platform Linktivity.
CrossHub is also exploring opportunities in cross-border remittance. Under a project commissioned by the Korea Internet & Security Agency (KISA), it is developing a stable-token remittance solution based on cross-border API connections, with plans to link Korean and Vietnamese banks.
Kim expects blockchain to become less of a standalone industry and more of a foundational technology that enhances fields such as artificial intelligence (AI), quantum technology and AI agents. Beyond technical maturity, he stressed, what matters is securing services and markets that users find easy to adopt.
CrossHub tailors its approach to each overseas market. Japan’s regulatory environment resembles Korea’s, but market entry and building trust take time. Singapore, with its advanced financial services and relatively active collaboration between startups and corporates, is being positioned as a hub for pilots and commercialization. The company plans to expand technology validated in Singapore into Europe and North America, with North America as its long-term target market.
Product development continues on an annual cycle. CrossHub launched its identity verification solution IDBlock in 2024, followed by the payment solution B-Pay in 2025. This year it introduced V-Pay, featuring voice authentication, and it is developing another product slated for release in 2027. The company accumulates technology from identity verification to payments and voice authentication, then turns it into real business.
CrossHub has also broadened its investor base. In 2025, it raised funding from four accelerators, and all four returned as follow-on investors in its recently closed round. Two banks and a government institution also participated.
Support from SVC has aided its global expansion. CrossHub uses SVC as a base for Travel Pass, one of its flagship services. Located near Hongdae, the space allows the team to engage directly with tourists and better understand the needs of foreign visitors to Seoul. Networking through support programs, along with meeting rooms, conference spaces and other facilities, has also helped drive the business forward.
“Since moving into SVC, our global networking has grown, expanding our reach from about 20 countries last year to about 40 this year,” Kim said. “The diverse networks and support programs have helped us scale the business.”
CrossHub plans to convert the partnerships and validation cases it has secured abroad into actual contracts and service operations, and then extend them to other countries and industries. “Our strength is that we build up and expand our technology every year and commercialize it,” Kim said. “We aim to grow into a technology-driven fintech company.”
The company is also a resident of SVC Seoul, a global startup hub in Seoul’s Hongdae area. The hub was established to connect startups with strong overseas growth potential to companies, universities, and investors in Korea and abroad.
