MVNT, the AI dance startup co-founded by veteran K-pop choreographer Youngjun Choi, is launching its pre-Series A fundraising round with the goal of building a platform that pays choreographers every time their moves are used. Business Insider reported the target at $10 million, though an open-access version of the same article published by Business Insider Africa states the figure as $1 million; the correct sum has not been independently confirmed.
MVNT AI Dance Startup and the IP Problem It Was Built to Solve
Choi has spent 20 years in the dance industry and choreographed more than 800 K-pop routines, including BTS’s ‘I Need U’ and Seventeen’s ‘Falling Flower’, a complex three-and-a-half-minute piece he counts among his favourites. The problem, as he and co-founder Joon Jung see it, is that choreographers generate enormous cultural value while keeping almost none of the financial upside.
‘Dancers may have tens of thousands of pieces of choreography out there, but there isn’t a system through which they can benefit. There’s YouTube, or word of mouth. The truth is, the community isn’t generating the revenue that it could,’ Jung told Business Insider.
MVNT was not originally conceived as an AI company. Its founding logic was closer to a rights-management system: let choreographers upload their work, receive attribution, and earn a share of revenue whenever that work is used. The AI layer came later, powering a tool that lets users input music and generate new routines drawn from the uploaded choreography database.
According to Wowtale, MVNT secured $200,000 in seed funding from Seoul-based Mashup Ventures in 2024, with the company described as a South Korean dance IP startup focused on protecting choreographers’ rights using 3D technology. The company’s leadership extends beyond the two co-founders: the MVNT about page lists CTO Seiok Kim and 3D Technical Director Changgyu Seo, with offices in Gangnam-gu, Seoul, and Bellevue, Washington.
The platform currently has 1,100 users and more than 2,000 routines created on it. Enterprises can also access MVNT’s API for animation and choreography generation. The company worked with Epic Games Korea to develop an AI-powered music-to-dance suite using Unreal Engine; Ohchan Kwon, senior evangelist at Epic Games Korea, called MVNT ‘an example of one of the companies that’s driving the entertainment industry forward with their innovative work.’
The Copyright Battle That Framed the Debate
MVNT’s pitch sits inside a broader legal argument about who owns a dance move. US celebrity choreographer Kyle Hanagami brought that question into sharp focus when he sued Epic Games, alleging the maker of Fortnite had copied a routine he created for a Charlie Puth song, which he posted to YouTube in 2017. Fortnite launched the corresponding ‘It’s Complicated’ emote in August 2020, according to NBC News.
A federal judge initially dismissed the case, ruling Epic had copied only unprotected poses. The Ninth Circuit reversed that dismissal, but the dispute ultimately ended in a settlement reached on 12 February 2024, according to the EU Intellectual Property Helpdesk. The US Copyright Office’s general position remains that individual dance moves, short routines, and social dances are not copyrightable, which is precisely the gap MVNT is trying to work around through attribution and revenue-sharing rather than legal protection alone.
Choi and Jung draw a deliberate comparison to tools that lowered the barrier of entry in other creative fields. Jung told Business Insider: ‘Just like how Canva can be used to make designs, and how Suno can be used for music production, we see MVNT as a way for people to try dance and lower the barriers to entry.’ The first target audience is casual creators and meme makers; professional choreographers and enterprise animation clients come next as the model improves.
Choi is careful to frame the technology as a collaborator rather than a replacement. When asked whether AI could generate a routine comparable to Seventeen member Hoshi’s ‘Spider’, a piece he has called his magnum opus, Choi said: ‘I think that if there were tools to help create routines now, it would open up a great deal of new possibilities for choreographers’ creative directions.’ He added: ‘Dance is still something that comes from the heart and soul. Our intention is for the tool to be our assistant, like an employee.’
Whether the pre-Series A closes at $1 million or $10 million, the number MVNT will need to justify is harder to fake: how many choreographers are actually earning from the platform, and how much.