Korea's Startup & SME Grants: Where to Find Them, and Prepping Docs Without a Printer
Run a business long enough and you'll hear "government grants really help" a hundred times — but you get stuck right at where to even find them. Type "startup grant" into a search box and you get a wall of blog ads and agency landing pages, while the actual official notices are nowhere to be seen. And once you finally find a notice, the required documents become the next wall. "Attach your business registration and a bank passbook copy as a single PDF" — except there's no scanner in the office.
Here's the short version. There are exactly three places to look (K-Startup, Bizinfo, G2B), and prepping the documents takes nothing more than your phone camera and a few browser tools. Below is the whole flow for building your application files without paper, a printer, or a scanner — along with how the three portals differ.
Where do I look? — the three portals do different jobs
There are actually several official channels, but knowing just three, each with a different role, covers most cases. Here's how the commonly-confused trio breaks down.
| Portal | What you find | Best for |
|---|---|---|
| K-Startup (k-startup.go.kr) | Startup-focused programs — pre-startup packages, commercialization funding, startup education and mentoring | Aspiring & early-stage founders |
| Bizinfo (bizinfo.go.kr) | SME programs broadly — grants, loans, R&D, export and marketing support. Tallies more than 30,000 notices a year | Operating SMEs & small merchants |
| G2B (Nara Marketplace) (g2b.go.kr) | Public procurement bidding — where the government buys goods and services. Not a grant, but a sale/contract | Firms bidding on public contracts |
But the real wall is the paperwork
Once you've found a notice, this is usually where the sigh happens — the list of required documents on the application page. It varies by program, but small businesses tend to hit the same set.
- Copy of business registration — a scan or photo, as PDF
- Bank passbook copy — to verify the grant deposit account
- Application form & business plan — filled-in template, as PDF
- Company seal (dojang) — stamped on the form or agreement
- Merge several files into one PDF + keep it under the size limit
With a scanner it's manageable; without one, this is where people head out to a convenience-store print shop. But all five of these can be done with just your phone and a browser.
Building the application files without a printer
All you need is a phone. Let's take it one step at a time.
Photograph your documents into files
Shoot the business registration and passbook copy straight-on, in good light, without shadows. If you captured them as photos (JPG/PNG), running image to PDF makes a clean submission file. When you need to pull just the text out of a document photo, there's OCR (text extraction) too.
Turn templates into PDFs, and stamp the seal
Fill in the application or business-plan template you received as HWP/Word, then run document to PDF. If the form needs a company seal, photograph your physical seal, remove the background to get a transparent PNG, and place it directly on screen with PDF stamp & sign. No physical seal? Generate a seal for documents instead — just note a generated seal is a design element with no legal registered-seal effect, so use your actual seal wherever a registered one is required.
Merge the files into a single PDF
Many notices ask for "all documents attached as one PDF." Drop your business registration, passbook copy, and application into merge PDF in submission order to combine them. Need the opposite — pulling specific pages out of one file? Use split PDF.
Compress it if it's over the size limit
Online application systems often cap the attachment file size. Scans and photos tend to run large, so compress PDF shrinks the file while keeping text readable, and your upload goes through. Limits vary by program and system, so check the number stated in the notice first.
Especially handy if you're…
- An aspiring or early-stage founder — assembling the business plan and supporting docs for a K-Startup pre-startup package as PDFs, without a printer.
- A small-business or SME owner — attaching your business registration and passbook copy as one file for a Bizinfo grant or R&D notice.
- A firm bidding on public contracts — stamping a seal and hitting the size limit on proposals and evidence for G2B.
- A remote or solo operator — building the whole application file with just a laptop and phone, no office copier.
Three easy mistakes to avoid
In short — three places to look, a few tools for the docs
The real bottleneck in government support isn't information — it's where to look and how to build the documents. Narrow the search to K-Startup, Bizinfo, and G2B, and for the paperwork learn the flow once: image→PDF → stamp the seal → merge PDF → compress PDF. After that, you can build and submit the file the moment you receive a notice. Everything is free on the web with no install.
To map out what opens this year, start by opening the consolidated startup-support notice on Bizinfo.