As reported by SD Japan, Seoul-based LOC&ALL, the startup behind car navigation app Kimgisa, has raised $2.7M from Japan’s CyberAgent Ventures and two Korean investment firms, Neoplux and Partners Venture Capital. Prior to this round, the company had raised seed funding $930,000 from Partners Venture Capital in January. With these new funds, they plan to intensify their engineering and marketing efforts with the initial goal of expanding to Japan, with Mainland China and Indonesia to follow later.

Kimgisa is a location-based app for iOS and Android that acts as a touch-screen sat-nav device. Since its launch back in 2010, it has acquired more than 5 million users despite the fact that major Korean mobile carriers have similar apps installed by default on their smartphones.

The company projects that its primary revenue source will eventually come from big data, through an accumulation of user information, including their destinations. They are also planning to sell advertising sollutions to companies like Poing (restaurant booking), GooDoc (hospital finder), Saltlux (big data solution) and web portals like Korea’s Naver.

More about LOC&ALL: The company was founded in May of 2010 by three Busan natives: Jonghwan Park, Wontae Kim, and Myeongjin Sin, and all of whom previously conducted studies on location-based services at KTIT, the R&D body of Korea Telecom. They have also hired a number of engineers from KOSDAQ-listed mobile solution provider Point-i. YouTube demo here.

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