OptAI wins CES 2026 Innovation Award
OptAI has announced that it has been named a CES 2026 ‘Innovation Award Honouree’ for its proprietary platform, OptHancer. The award recognises OptAI's technological achievements ahead of CES 2026, the world's largest consumer electronics and IT exhibition, taking place this January in Las Vegas.
OptHancer is an end-to-end on-device AI solution designed to solve the critical bottlenecks of running large-scale AI models on resource-constrained devices. This prestigious award validates the global expansion strategy and vision of ‘Any Model, Any Device’ that OptAI presented at IFA 2025.
OptAI has demonstrated its expertise by optimising large language models (LLMs) for the latest mobile NPUs in collaboration with a major Korean telecommunications company, with the technology now preparing for commercial beta testing.
OptAI has also secured broad optimisation capabilities for large language models such as EXAONE 3.5 and 4.0, LLaMA 3, Gemma 2, and Qwen 2.5; vision models including DeTR and the YOLO family; and multimodal models such as Qwen2-VL and LLaVA. The company has demonstrated its technical strength across language, vision, and multimodal domains through optimisation results on the latest NPUs, including the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 2, Gen 3, and Elite.
"We are thrilled to receive the CES Innovation Award," said Junyoung Seo, COO of OptAI, who led the company's global expansion and its successful CES 2026 Innovation Award initiative. "This award validates our efforts to shape the future of on-device AI, enabling customised operations, enhanced security, and energy-efficient computing that transcends cloud dependency."
OptAI aims to leverage South Korea's strong manufacturing competitiveness to lead the global adoption of on-device AI. It has established technological credibility through collaborations with leading global enterprises, including LG Electronics, LGU+, and Hanwha Aerospace, and has secured investments from LG Electronics, FuturePlay, Mashup Ventures, and HL Mando. Building on these achievements, OptAI is pursuing global expansion into the United States, Japan, Germany, and beyond.
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