The ministry said Thursday it would recruit 10,000 participants for the second round — double the 5,000 chosen in the inaugural edition — under a plan announced jointly with related agencies at a national entrepreneurship strategy meeting.
The competition invites ordinary citizens to compete on the strength of an idea alone, without the polished business plans or lengthy resumes that conventional government contests demand.
Selected challengers receive early-stage mentoring, incubation and a shot at nationwide auditions.
Of the 10,000 slots, 8,000 will be allocated to general and technology categories and 2,000 to a local track. At least 80 percent of those chosen must be prospective founders yet to launch a business, while 70 percent will come from outside the greater Seoul area in a bid to spread entrepreneurship across the regions.
The revival comes after a bruising episode that shook public trust in the program.
On June 18, the ministry disclosed that the personal information of all 5,000 first-round finalists — including names, email addresses and summaries of their startup ideas — had been exposed.
An internal investigation found the data had been harvested not by an outside hacker but by an AI solutions company taking part as a support-service vendor, which allegedly used abnormal API requests and web-crawling techniques to scrape email addresses hidden from public view before sending promotional messages.
Han Seong-sook, then the SMEs minister who designed the platform and has since become Korea's second female prime minister, issued a public apology on June 22, saying she had failed to protect the trust of citizens who took up the challenge of starting a business.
Applications for the second round open on Aug. 20, with successful candidates to be announced in early October, the ministry said. Of the 10,000 challengers, 2,200 will advance to regional auditions and 400 to a national contest.
To guard against a repeat, the ministry said it would tighten platform security and personal-data controls, submit the system to a National Intelligence Service security review and a privacy-impact assessment by the Personal Information Protection Commission, and narrow its roster of AI solution vendors to about 50 firms, down from the 283 companies that supplied solutions in the first round.
The ministry also moved to knit the contest into a wider ecosystem, establishing startup "clubs" in the Seoul, Daejeon, Busan and Gwangju regions where veteran founders, investors and support agencies gather with challengers, and issuing "challenge certificates" that grant preferential treatment in state financing and research funding.
"In the second Startup for All, we will open the door of challenge to more citizens and actively support re-challenge and startups across diverse fields, while building a foundation for entrepreneurs to grow together within the startup ecosystem even after their challenge," First Vice Minister Roh Yong-seok said.
AJP Takeaways
• South Korea's SMEs ministry is doubling its "Startup for All" contest to 10,000 participants, pressing ahead just weeks after a June data breach exposed all 5,000 first-round finalists' personal information and forced the program's indefinite suspension.
• The relaunch pairs expansion with damage control: the vendor pool blamed for the leak is being cut from 283 firms to about 50, and the platform will face a National Intelligence Service security review and a privacy-impact assessment.
• The breach toppled to the top of the ministry — then-minister Han Seong-sook, who designed the platform, apologized publicly before becoming Korea's second female prime minister — underscoring the political stakes riding on the program's recovery.
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