Early investment specialist venture capital Kakao Ventures revealed on the 13th the info-graphic with the 2018 investment activity. This year, Kakao Ventures invested new and follow-up investment of 33.7 billion Won into 43 start-ups. Seed round and early investment of Series A round were the most invested.
So far, the portfolio of Kakao Ventures was 140 or more and the accumulated investment amount was 135 billion Won.
This year, Kakao Ventures widened its investment scope to new industry area such as AR and blockchain. It invested in LetinAR and Spatial in the AR area and Codebox and Tera in the blockchain area. It also newly invested in teams expanding to the Indian market such as Limese and My Duty.
Jeong Shin-Ah, CEO of Kakao Ventures, explained that “this year was a time when Kakao Ventures did not stop new and meaningful challenge to become a reliable partner of start-ups.” This year, Kakao Ventures newly established a value up partner team beginning with game and block-chain area. Of these, CEO Jeong-Wook of mobile game company Neptune, which is the portfolio as well as a listed company, is acting as the game changer. To add, Kakao Ventures is actively conducting series investment of 3 times or more of existing portfolio such as Lunit and Jubilee Works.
There was also external change. On march, the company name was changed from ‘K Cube Ventures’. Moreover, Jeong Shin-Ah, who has been with Kakao Ventures for 5-6 years or more and was also a senior executive at the time, was appointed CEO and Kim Ki-Jun, who was senior executive at the time was appointed to vice president.
CEO Jeong Shin-Ah said that “Kakao Ventures will continue to actively lead the core competencies of the early team as the role of advancing the future with start-ups and strive to make them into long time big winners.
Meanwhile, Kakao Ventures, which was launched in April, 2012, is currently operating 5 fund cooperatives of a total of 204.6 billion Won.
