From February to March, we hosted AI events in Tokyo and Seoul with OpenAI as a guest.

In Tokyo, on February 25, 2026, Z Venture Capital (ZVC), together with OpenAI Japan and LY Corporation, hosted AI Dev Night – The Current State of AI Utilization and the Reality of Product Development Ahead,” an event focused on AI development for startups. The event brought together teams building AI-driven products to exchange practical insights on how to develop and deploy AI in real-world applications. OpenAI Japan shared perspectives from the forefront of AI research, while LY Corporation introduced how AI is being applied across one of Japan’s largest digital ecosystems.

In Seoul, on March 3, 2026, ZVC hosted a portfolio workshop with OpenAI in Gangnam for Korean portfolio companies. More than 40 founders and technical leaders joined the session, which focused on practical approaches to building AI-powered products and agentic systems through hands-on workshops and discussions with OpenAI experts.

The Tokyo Event

The first session featured Kazuhiro Sera, DevEx Engineer at OpenAI Japan. During the session, Sera shared how OpenAI incorporates AI into its own product development workflows, explaining both the thinking behind their approach and practical examples from real development environments.

Kazuhiro Sera（X：@seratch）/ DevEx Engineer, SDKs & Japan @ OpenAI

He also introduced the Agents SDK, OpenAI’s toolkit for building AI agents. The SDK enables developers to start with simple code while providing production-ready capabilities such as tracing and observability. The session also included a demonstration of how developers can use the Realtime API to build voice agents that process speech input and generate responses in real time with relatively minimal code.

Sera also introduced Codex, OpenAI’s coding agent, which can be used as a tool to support code generation and development tasks. He explained that within OpenAI’s internal workflows, AI is already widely used for tasks such as code reviews and bug fixes, helping improve both development speed and overall code quality.

The event also featured a panel discussion with Shinji Kobayashi (Unit Lead / Principal Architect at LY Corporation), Yuta Horii (CTO of SmartBank), and Kazuhiro Sera from OpenAI Japan, moderated by Masaki Yuda, Partner at Z Venture Capital. The discussion focused on the current state of AI adoption and how product development is evolving in the age of AI.

During the session, each speaker shared practical examples and challenges from their respective organizations.

From LY Corporation, Kobayashi highlighted the importance of context engineering when building AI-powered systems. Rather than simply increasing the amount of information given to AI models, improving accuracy often depends on carefully structuring inputs and selecting the most relevant context for each task.

From SmartBank, Horii introduced how AI is being integrated into the household finance service Onebank. AI is used in features such as automatic receipt scanning and an AI-powered chat function that allows users to ask questions based on their payment data, showing how AI can be embedded into products to solve real user problems.

The panel also discussed how AI is reshaping development workflows. While AI now generates a large portion of code, processes such as code review are increasingly becoming bottlenecks. At the same time, AI has significantly accelerated prototype development, allowing teams to build and test products much earlier in the cycle, sometimes even before conducting user interviews.


The Seoul Event

In Seoul, on March 3, 2026, ZVC hosted a portfolio workshop with OpenAI for Korean portfolio companies at AP Tower in Gangnam.

The event brought together more than 40 founders and technical leaders from ZVC’s Korean portfolio companies, resulting in a fully booked session. The workshop focused on practical approaches to building AI-powered products and agentic systems using OpenAI technologies.

The session opened with a brief introduction to OpenAI’s startup initiatives by Thomas Jeng, Lead of the OpenAI Startups Team, and Yuha Han, Account Director on the Startups Team.

The main workshop was led by Jaewon Lee, Solution Architect at OpenAI, under the theme “Building Agentic Systems with OpenAI.” During the session, Lee showed how agent-based architectures can be applied across different service verticals, followed by a live demo and an interactive Q&A with participating founders and engineers.

Participants from ZVC portfolio companies shared positive feedback, noting that the session offered valuable insights into practical AI implementation. As a special benefit following the event, OpenAI also provided attendees with a one-month free trial of Codex.

For OpenAI, the workshop was also a meaningful milestone, as it marked their first portfolio workshop held with a venture capital firm in Korea.

ZVC plans to continue working with LY Corporation and OpenAI to support startup communities and initiatives that advance AI adoption and product development.

Startups and companies interested in collaborating with ZVC are welcome to reach out.

zvc-info@zvc.vc