K-pop’s biggest stars, from BTS to Seventeen, have danced routines that Youngjun Choi choreographed. Now, the top choreographer is betting that AI can help anyone with an idea, a phone, and no dance training to create the next hit K-pop dance.
It all started six years ago when Choi met Joon Jung, then a dancer in his 20s who wanted to figure out a way for choreographers to build sustainable careers.
Now, with more than 800 K-pop routines to his name, Choi has gone into business with Jung. They co-founded the startup MVNT to build an AI system for programmable dance, much like Suno, the generative AI music platform. Jung, who worked in tech and crypto, helped set up the company and is now its CEO.
In 2024, MVNT got $200,000 in seed funding from Mashup Ventures, a Seoul-based venture capital firm. Now MVNT is launching its pre-Series A fundraising and hopes to raise $10 million to take its work further.
The creative mind behind iconic K-pop dances
Choi, now in his 40s, has been in the dance business for 20 years. He’s seen stars rise and fall into obscurity, and been the unseen hand behind some of the industry’s most famous routines. BTS’s “I Need U” — an early hit song from the Grammy-nominated group — was one of them.
The choreographer cites the band Seventeen’s “Falling Flower,” a complex three-and-a-half-minute routine, as one of his favorites. Choi told Business Insider dances like this can take weeks or even months to master — even for a band like Seventeen, whose members are all top-tier performers.
Despite being the creative mastermind behind K-pop stars’ iconic dance moves, Choi and his peers realized they weren’t creating work they could keep earning money from.
The company wasn’t originally conceived as an AI startup. Instead, its goal was to solve an intellectual property problem.
“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.
Some choreographers have tried to change that. In the US, celebrity choreographer Kyle Hanagami sued Epic Games, alleging the maker of “Fortnite” copied his routines for the game. While Hanagami’s case was settled, the US Copyright Office generally doesn’t consider individual dance moves, short routines, or social dances to be copyrightable.
Cutting the dancers in
MVNT lets dancers build portfolios and receive credit whenever their uploaded choreography is used.
The platform then uses the choreography database to power AI tools, allowing users to input music and generate new routines.
The whole idea, the duo said, is for the dancers who create the original routines to get a piece of the profit instead of being cut out. MVNT is in the process of building its app and database — it has reached 1,100 users, and notched more than 2,000 dance routines created on the platform.
The first layer of MVNT’s target audience is meme creators, much like how Suno started with casual music makers. As the model improves, Choi and Jung say the plan is to have professional choreographers use it as part of their creative process.
Enterprises, too, can use MVNT’s API for animation and choreography generation.
MVNT has already shown how its tools can support animation, choreography, and interactive content creation, said Ohchan Kwon, senior evangelist at Epic Games Korea. The company worked with Epic to develop its AI-powered music-to-dance suite using Unreal Engine, Epic’s 3D creation tool.
MVNT is an example of one of the companies that’s driving the entertainment industry forward with their innovative work,” Kwon said.
Dance should still be human-made, Choi says
Jung and Choi say people skeptical of AI-generated choreography are missing the bigger picture.
“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,” Jung said. “We want to make the creator ecosystem more sustainable, so dancers will be able to make enough revenue to keep doing creative work.”
When asked whether AI could ever generate a routine like Seventeen member Hoshi’s “Spider,” — a dance Choi has called his magnum opus — Choi said MVNT isn’t trying to replace choreographers.
“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,” Choi said.
He said AI should support choreographers, rather than replace them.
“Dance is still something that comes from the heart and soul. Our intention is for the tool to be our assistant, like an employee,” he said.
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