‘Tin In Coop Venture Capital Association’ specialized for travel and leisure start-ups, launches on January 15. For the first time in Korea, representatives of Korean travel agencies and related field, as well as commerce platforms are participating in ‘Tin in Coop VC association,’ planning to provide customized support for travel and leisure start-up. They raised seed money of $800,000 and plan to expand the investment size by making the membership conditions to give…

On January 13, Eight Panda, a korean mobile game company, announced that they raised $2.4 million as development fund from Korea Investment Partners and Ankang Venture Investment. Eight Panda consists of developers with the experience in title development of major online games in Korea. With 10 years’ of experience in game development and experience of conducting initial stage to the final service, a new type of RPG customized for mobile will be…

DaumKakao has launched the driver’s version of ‘Kakao Taxi’ Android app on the 13th. This application is a prerelease version to recruit drivers before  launching the passengers’ version of the app. Any registered taxi drivers can download the app and register as a member. To register, drivers will have to enter their names, first 6 digits of their social security number, license number, upload their photos and license image. DaumKakao then approves…

Often young startups face difficulty in making decisions when they look for the right source for incubating and investments. Even if you are lucky enough to find a VC, explaining your product to someone who has no background knowledge could feel like talking to a wall. To help with these issues, we have prepared a report containing backgrounds, interested fields, and startup development directions for 2015, of top the 5 accelerator in…

Full time job (after 3 months internship) & Part time Working in HQ of beSUCESS in Seoul, South Korea Main Task : Korean and Global IT, Tech, Startup Reporting, Writing and Editing Articles Key Responsibility : Fluent Enough to Write Articles in English Interested and Curious about Korean Startup Ecosystem and beSUCCESS Understanding Journalism and duty as Writer. Wanting to Contribute to Korean Startup Ecosystem, Especially Helping them to Go Global Send Resume and…

B2C distribute portal service Mesh Korea (CEO Jeung-bum Yu) announced total of 4 billion won (roughly $4 million USD) of investment from multiple investors including EG Partners (Daumkakao Young Adult Startup Investment Union). In addition to EG Partners, Shinhan Capital, Seoul Investment Partners, and Solborn Investment, also decided to participate in the investment of Mesh Korea due to its growth potential. Since the establishment of January 2013, Mesh Korea has provided distribution…

On last month, Woowa Bros. (CEO Bong-jin Kim)’s delivery app ‘Baedal Minjok’ reached their best record as they surpassed 5 million monthly orders. On December 2014, the report shows 5.2 million delivery counts, a 20% increase from November’s 4.3 million. The estimated total transaction fee is approximately 95 billion won. 2014’s annual delivery broke 40 million mark as well indicating a 230% increase compared to 2013.  Statistic Korea report shows that there…

Company builder Fast Track Asia announced their 8 million dollar funding from Wonder Holdings and Insight Venture Partners of United States on the 5th. This is the second investment under Wonder Holdings’ lead and participation of previous investor Insight Venture Partners since December 2012. Min-ju Lee of Atinum, Eun-sang Lee of Carbon Eyed, ex-Nexon CCO Sang-bum Kim and other previous as well as current IT founders funded 3.3 million dollars for the…

Daumkakao announced the announcement for their buyout of ‘Kids Note’, a smart alarm notification service for daycare services. Daumkakao now owns 100% of the share and Kids Note became the subsidiary company. Kids Note is a service that allows kindergarten or daycare teachers to post children’s daily schedule, diet, pictures, and other announcements with PC and other smart devices for the parents to have live-time access. About 30% or 14,000 kindergartens, daycares,…

This year, Coupang reached the top of the social commerce game with two major investments. In order to chase Coupang ‘WEMAKEPRICE’ announced their buyout of Ticket Monster (TMON). There was reserved bidding session for TMON until the morning of 31st. 10 fund manager companies including Carlyle, Affinity,  KKR, Anchor Partners, and WEMAKEPRICE participated in this session. TMON came out on 2010 as the very first domestic social commerce platform. It was purchased…

On January 2nd, Small and Medium Business Administration revealed their startup support plan, 2015 TIPS. TIPS is a technology startup support program designed to attract more private investments. Through angel investors from major corporate, TIPS selects promising teams and provides aids like governmental R&D. Small and Medium Business Administration established this ‘Israel style’ startup support program last year and it gained a great amount of popularity because once a startup team secures…

As reported by Coupang’s President Bom Kim, his four year old ecommerce company has surpassed monthly turnover of 200 billion won (a little shy of $200 million USD). While the comapny started life as a daily deals site, it rapidly became an ecommerce focused enterprise, escaping the global downturn in daily deals that put market leader Groupon into major trouble this year. Kim now sees his largest rival as Amazon, which is…

Jae-ho Choi CEO of Drama & Company has announced that their business card organizing app ‘Remember’ has secured $2 million USD from Daekyo Investment, CyberAgent Ventures, and Capstone Partners. This is the second round of funding for the company this year, after Capstone Partners invested $1 million USD. The additional funding will help them prepare a stable foundation for ongoing service development and management. Unlike the previous OCR based business card organizing…

  As announced in Sparklabs Bi-Monthly Review, Korean startup Jandi confirmed that it has raised an angel round of nearly US$2 million, co-led by Softbank Ventures and Cherubic Ventures. Jandi is a business communication platform for PC, iOS, and Android devices that allows teams to securely and instantly communicate while also easily being able to share files, search through past messages, and more. There are, of course, other apps that address these concerns,…

Recently Job Planet and Fortune Korea co-hosted ‘Korea’s Top 50 Working Environments’ at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in Seoul. A studyvwas conducted of both large scale companies as well as small & medium sized enterprises, including the startups. From April to November a short list of 792 was chosen from a total of 140,000. After final assessment, 50 companies were awarded on the night. The criteria to select the most satisfying work…

After three years in operation, NFLabs, Korea’s most promising Big Data startup has raised series A funding from Big Basin Capital, Bon Angels and Coolidge Corner investment. The funding of $1.5 million USD will be primarily used to bring the startups big data analytics and visualization software to a global audience. NFLabs CEO Sejun Ra explained, “the investment will really boost our expansion to North America. We will focus on speeding up…

Korean gaming company ‘SundayToz’ and The Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Development and have created the ‘AniPang Fund.’ The fund will be aimed at startups in the following fields: Gaming, Social, digital content, platform based technology and contents based technology. The ‘AniPang Future Contents Investment Association’ will operate under the management of Smilegate Investment. While the fund will primarily focused on startups in Korea, a representative from SundayToz has confirmed that they are…

According to an article on Business Korea, the Korean government is planning to invest at least $209 million USD over the next five years to promote the growth of the game industry. This comes in a year where game developer 4:33 Creative Labs raised around $110 million USD from Tencent / Line, Smilegate bought a $110 million USD stake in Sunday Toz, Devsisters went public at a $627 million USD valuation, we announced…

K Cube Ventures recently announced a $700,000 investment into mobile game developer ‘A-33 Studio.’ With this investment A-33 Studio will focus on ramping up their mobile FPS game production and aim to be ready to release their first title by end of next year. The title is named ‘Project S’ for now, and is an ambitious plan to maximize online mobile FPS game experience by integrating a fully optimized user interface along…

As reported by Business Korea, the  Korean government recently announced that it plans to relax regulations on new innovation-driven industries, including as financial technology (fintech) and the Internet of Things (IoT). This is a positive regulatory signal for local startups in these industries that have struggled against regulation. It also bodes well for the new startup accelerator in Seongdo, that will run its first hardware / IoT / Smart home program in 2015. At…