Kate Park

Three stories in 2025Q3 marked a shift in Kate Park’s coverage toward Asian AI infrastructure and enterprise startups, culminating in Sakana AI’s export-ban-era model claims.

Who they are

Kate Park appears in the corpus as a technology journalist covering startups, financing, platform companies and policy-sensitive technology across Asia, with especially frequent ties to South Korea, Tokyo, Singapore and Seoul. The stories range from Terraform Labs and Coupang to AI-chip maker Rebellions and Tokyo AI companies, placing Park’s work at the intersection of regional venture activity and major technology shifts.

The recent arc

The recent coverage peak came in 2025Q3, when Park’s stories included a look inside South Korea’s Pangyo Techno Valley, LayerX’s $100 million Series B for AI-enabled back-office automation, and MarqVision’s $48 million Series B for AI-based anti-counterfeit monitoring. That cluster moved beyond individual funding announcements toward the startup ecosystems and enterprise applications supporting Asia’s AI expansion.

The latest story, on Tokyo-based Sakana AI’s Fugu and China-based 360’s Tulongfeng claiming to rival Anthropic’s banned Mythos and Fable 5 amid a US export ban, makes geopolitical technology constraints more explicit. It follows coverage of Sakana AI’s roughly $135 million Series B and SoftBank’s planned Osaka plant purchase for an OpenAI-related data-center effort, reinforcing AI compute, models and deployment as the current organizing thread.

The tension

The central tension is Asia’s drive to build globally consequential AI companies and infrastructure while access to technology is shaped by cross-border restrictions and competition. Sakana AI, 360, SoftBank and OpenAI feature in that dynamic, while earlier coverage of Rebellions and Pangyo shows that South Korea and Japan are also pursuing domestic capacity in chips, research and commercial AI rather than serving only as downstream markets.

Why it matters

If this trajectory holds, Park’s coverage will be increasingly useful for tracking whether Asian startup ecosystems can translate large financings and regional industrial assets into durable AI platforms and enterprise adoption. The outcome remains uncertain: export controls may create openings for local alternatives, but they can also constrain the compute, partnerships and market access needed for those alternatives to compete internationally.

Related: South Korea · Tokyo · Singapore · South Korea-based Rebellions, which develops AI chips, raised a ~$124M · Coupang reports Q2 revenue up 16% YoY to $5.8B, a $145M net income, up