As Korea continues to brand itself as a startup nation, increasingly foreigners are becoming interested in joining Korean startups or even starting up their own venture in Korea. But getting visas in Korea for entrepreneurial endeavours can be daunting and is often tied up with red tape, as the government grapples with the best way forward to open Korea to foreign workers in the tech and startup space. A few of the…

You need only check out professional eaters on YouTube or Psy’s latest video to see that eating is a national obsession in Korea. What’s more, metropolitan Seoul is active 24 hours a day and is home to around 26 million people. Taking this into account its not surprising that the market size for the restaurant sector is around $60Bn per year, with more than 500,000 restaurants open for business. The area of…

Imagine if department stores in busy urban shopping districts could lock-in customers travelling into the area, before they even arrived. Kimgisa, a navigation app developed by Korean startup locNall aims to be the No. 1 player in the navigation and location-based marketing industry in Asia and make that marketing dream a reality. The team has already started working with large clients like Incheon International Airport to deliver targeted marketing to airport visitors…

Hearing about employees giving up their highly-prized, stable, and well-paid corporate careers in Korea’s tech behemoths used to be incredibly rare. But the young team at ASDTech has done exactly that, choosing to give up salaries of well over $100k for the excitement and promise of entrepreneurship. Having founded ASDTech in 2013 after leaving LG Electronics, they developed their while-label cloud service, ‘Cloudike’, and have now secured their first major clients. Furthermore they have…

Global Brain, an early and growth stage investor from Tokyo has just announced its most recent investment in a Korean startup. The “GB-V Growth Fund Investment Limited Partnership” managed by Global Brain Corporation, has invested an undisclosed amount in Mbite Inc., from Seoul, Korea. Founded in 2011 MBite is a global provider of game illustrators’ matching platform “rainbow.dot”. The fresh finances will be used to bolster R&D capabilities and hire a global sales team….

The Korean startup ecosystem has been exploding over the last couple of years. As more interesting startups begin to emerge, so the support services to power their success also become more diverse and more mature. There are a number of key accelerator programs in Seoul now, that offer a range of services and finance for early stage Korean companies. Interestingly there is also now a distinct push towards helping Korean startups connect…

There are a number of good resources for finding information on Korean Technology, business and tech start- ups. Some are a bit more difficult to find, so here is a list of the most helpful news outlets and startup resources for Korea. beSUCCESS: If your reading this article than you no doubt know who beSUCCESS is and what we do. But just in case: beSUCCESS is a South Korean media platform about startups,…

As has been reported widely in Asia, South Korea is using the fact that Windows XP is no longer supported as a reason to walk away from Microsoft completely. While the rational for this stance makes sense; updating to new versions of the Microsoft software can be expensive and time-consuming, the government should also immediately discontinue its use of Hangul. Hangul is a Korean software package similar to MS Office that is used as the default (and…

Microsoft recently announced that it intends to fully enter the Korean internet search market later this year. This does not seem wise in a market that has been utterly dominated by Korean players for over a decade. Yahoo withdrew from the market after a fifteen year failed push into Korea. Google has fared a little better, having now climbed to around 10% – 15% market share, but it has been a long…

Junghee Ryu is a rare breed of Korean entrepreneur. Not only did he found a tech company that sold to Intel, but now he has decided to reinvest his returns into the Korean startup ecosystem and has opened his high-tech accelerator, FuturePlay, for business. Junghee founded Olaworks, an augmented reality technology company in 2006 and sold the company to Intel in 2012 for a reported $30M. Olaworks and a Silicon Valley-based tech company, both of which…

Korean gaming giants, Gamevil and Com2us, which were in fierce competition for the last 15 years, are now actively seeking to create synergy in line with their M&A deal that we reported last year. Following Gameville’s acquisition of Com2us, the two firms have working towards release of their new combined platform HIVE, which is now live. After struggling against the huge success of KakaoTalk’s gaming platform (released in July 2012), the two companies…

Rakuten Ventures today announced the launch of a $100M global investment fund. This fund builds on the success of the Southeast Asia fund, which was launched in 2013 and counts Carousell, Visenze, Coda Payments and Send Anywhere among its investment portfolio. The investment in Send Anywhere is Rakuten’s first investment in a company outside South East Asia and their first in a South Korean startup, ESTMob. The new fund will target investments…

CHINCHIN is a social dating app that is creating a new type of interaction for the dating scene by connecting you with friends of your friends. This in a bid to remove the dangers of connecting online with complete strangers. Recently at beLAUNCH, the company won the Asan Nanum Foundation Prize, and $18k as a non-equity cash investment. With the increasing levels of spam on Facebook, people are now less willing to talk…

A team of Korean Engineers, PhD-level Neuro-scientists and ex-Googlers is taking on one of the most feared brain diseases we face in the modern age. Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) kills around 500,000 each year and the cost of care globally is estimated at $220Bn per annum. While this degenerative disease has no cure, YBrain has developed a solution for slowing the affects, with a rate of success believed to be greater than any…

[metaslider id=”17793″] After the successful releases of BeNative apps in Korean, Japanese, and Chinese, SMATOOS is expanding its service with Speak Real English, an “English to English” learning application that helps English language learners practice through video lessons. With this app, SMATOOS hopes to provide an alternative to stuffy textbook learning and offer support to help users cultivate practical and natural-sounding English skills. “Speak Real English” features video content of real native English speakers filmed around…

MyRealTrip, a Korean startup that provides overseas travelers with personalized guided tours in thier mother tongue has just announced their third round of funding. SmileGate Investment led the round, contributing 70% of the funding, with Capstone Partners joining. This Series A round has provided an injection of almost $1M to help the company build out their Android and iOS mobile apps and expand to include Chinese travelers visiting Korea, as well as…

Coupang, a leader in next generation e-commerce based in Seoul Korea, has raised $100 million in financing led by Sequoia Capital, with participation by existing investors Greenoaks Capital Management, Rose Park’s Disruptive Innovation Fund and LaunchTime. This investment comes at a time when rumours about a possible IPO at some point in 2015 abound in the local Korean startup ecosystem, and follows in the same week that Korea’s other ‘mega-startup,’ Kakao Corp….

StyleShare CEO Jayoung Yoon is only 25 years old, but has built a formidable fashion and style platform and has just secured a further $2.5M to expand her vision globally. This series B investment from LB Investment follows a seed round from Primer (20M KRW), and a seed round from Suprema & the founder of Daum ($08.M). StyleShare as a mobile fashion contents platform that allows users to share what they are…

Kakao Corp, this week has announced an agreement to buy Korea’s second largest domestic Internet-portal operator Daum Communications in an all-stock deal. It is hoped that the deal will boost the merged entity’s presence in on both Web and mobile services. The deal comes at a time when tech analysts are heralding the end of messaging 2.0, as most independent messaging services which have seen enormous growth recently will now have merged or been…

Hello Market, who have just announced their first funding round of $2.5M, is a C2C marketplace platform service that allows users to sell, buy, and exchange goods and services through mobile platforms (Android, iOS) as well as the web. According to Co-Founder Alber Hahn their goal now is to continue to apply, update, and expand upon the craigslist C2C commerce model, with a current focus on further expansion into Japan. The Hello Market…