AI startup Waddle said on Sunday it has established a San Francisco-based subsidiary, Waddle Labs, to accelerate global expansion with its AI growth agent Gentoo.

Waddle co-founder and director Yongwon Cho (조용원) will lead the U.S. unit. Ahead of setting up the U.S. entity, Waddle won first place among 93 global teams at the 'OpenAI GPT-5 Hackathon' hosted by OpenAI in San Francisco in August last year.

Since launching Gentoo on the U.S. Shopify App Store in September last year, Waddle has signed paid contracts with about 10 U.S. brands in cities including San Francisco and Los Angeles as it validated the market. Based on that, the company carried out localisation tests and said 4 e-commerce companies that adopted Gentoo immediately after its initial release saw average monthly transaction value rise by more than 35 percent after 4 months.

The company said Gentoo in South Korea focused on acting as an "AI clerk" by improving purchase conversion through user conversations and automating repetitive inquiries. It said the global version uses digital clones, or virtual customers, built from user conversation data accumulated in South Korea to diagnose and improve factors that hinder purchase conversion across an online store. It said the focus is on replacing store operations teams and agencies with an "AI online store operator" and helping maximise e-commerce sales.

Waddle plans to target e-commerce companies in the United States with a strategy centred on "AI-based real-time conversion rate improvement". It plans to position Gentoo as an action-oriented AI agent aimed at increasing actual sales conversion and orders, rather than as a simple chatbot, while expanding local partnerships and upgrading models based on customer data to broaden its business scope across North America.

Yongwon Cho said, "After last year's OpenAI hackathon, we gained confidence that Gentoo's technology is competitive on the global stage, and that momentum helped us quickly expand the business, including moving on to actual contracts in the United States." He added, "We will continue to advance an AI architecture optimised for the U.S. market to provide practical support for revenue growth among global e-commerce operators."