Top 15 Social VC Funds in South Korea

Investor	Social South Korea investments
Kakao Ventures	4
Hana Financial Investment	2
D3 Jubilee	2
Kclavis	1
Kaist Venture Investment Holdings	1
East Gate Partners	1
Stonebridge Capital	1
SparkLabs Global Ventures	1
Base Investment	1
Goodwater Capital	1
Neptune Investment Management	1
Capstone Partners	1
POSCO Venture Capital	1
Alumni Partners	1
Big Basin Capital	1

We are an independent subsidiary of Kakao Corp. & the most active, startup-friendly early stage VC of Korea. (Limited Partnerships, not strategic.).

Investment focus

Software, Information Technology, Artificial Intelligence
Seed, Series A, Series B
South Korea, United States, Indonesia

Portfolio highlights

Kinolights — Kinolights is a movie rating and recommendation services provider.
Bungee — Bungee is a recruitment platform that provides hiring, SEO, content marketing, and performance marketing services.
Sandy Floor — Sandy Floor is a multiplayer games platform. It develops of casual fun games.

Hana Financial Investment Company Limited offers brokerage, securities dealing, underwriting, mutual funds, and online trading services

Investment focus

Information Technology, Biotechnology, Health Care
Series A, Series B, Seed
South Korea, Singapore, India

Portfolio highlights

Trustay — Trustay is a real estate asset management company.
AIZEN Global — AIZEN is redesigning Digital Banking with CreditConnect, powered by our proprietary ABACUS AutoML platform specialized in the financial services industry. CreditConnect is an AI lending platform designed to bridge the gap between banks and data economy platforms, and automate key decision-making processes in accordance with the credit cycle. Thecompany has secured Series B round funding from a state-led fintech innovation fund (K-Growth) led by major Korean banks to roll out CreditConnect in Southeast Asia.We are also leading the digital transformation in the financial services industry using proprietary AutoML platform ABACUS, with successful use cases in underwriting, fraud detection, product development, claim analysis, and more.
Kuntian New Energy — Hebei Kuntian New Energy is a producer of anode materials for lithium-ion batteries.

D3 is headquartered in Seoul and San Francisco, pioneering the domestic and global impact investment areas. D3 redefines the role of capital by investing in entrepreneurial innovation that improves the lives of low-income families, women, and immigrants, and creates an environmentally sustainable world.Invest in ICT start-ups with highsocio-environmental value in low-income countries such as Korea, USA and South America, Africa and India.

Investment focus

Information Technology, Software, Health Care
Seed, Funding Round, Series A
South Korea, United States, Kenya

Portfolio highlights

Green Mineral — Green Mineral specializes in recycling metals in an environmentally friendly and cost-effective manner using microalgae. Green Mineral has developed technology to recycle lithium in an environmentally friendly manner by extracting lithium using a bio-mineralization technique rather than an existing organic solvent.
Skycool Systems — At SkyCool Systems, our mission is to deliver sustainable, energy-efficient cooling solutions to customers interested in reducing energy costs and carbon footprint. We’ve pioneered radiative cooling as a technology, and shown that specially designed optical films can enable this passive approach to cooling throughout the day. These optical filmsare highly reflective to sunlight but also emit thermal radiation exceptionally well to the cold of space through our atmosphere, enabling daytime operation during the hottest hours of the day. Our core innovation is a rooftop cooling panel. We apply the radiative film to rooftop panels and integrate them with air conditioning and refrigeration systems. The panels can be used as an add-on to air conditioning and refrigeration systems and in some circumstances even replace an air condensing unit. Our technology is accelerating the transition to a cleaner and more sustainable future.
Caredoc — CareDoc is an elderly care professional platform that provides information on proven elderly care facilities. Consumers looking for elderly care services were not able to find the information they wanted online or getting inaccurate information through word of mouth.On the other hand, providers of care services were having difficulty incollecting elderly customers. Caredoc solves these problems by providing verified care servise provider information on the mobile.

Kclavis pursues a stable return on customer assets. It provides technology-driven companies with investments and asset management services. The company was founded in 2013 and is headquartered in Seoul.

Investment focus

Biotechnology, Pharmaceutical, Therapeutics
Series B, Series A, Series C
South Korea, United States

Portfolio highlights

R&R Lab — R&R Lab is a semiconductor manufacturing startup that develops heat treatment equipment.
Inkle — Inkle is a facility data platform that offers industrial software technology services for equipment makers and producers.
Nuon Media — Nuon Media is an Internet e-book store that sells famous domestic romance martial arts fantasy fantasy novels.

Kaist Venture Investment Holdings is a startup company that invests in startups that solve social problems through innovative technologies. They invest in businesses that maximize synergy by pursuing both social and financial values at the same time. It focuses on five sectors including health, environment, education, elimination of inequality, andsocial infrastructure. Kaist Venture Investment Holdings was founded on October 31, 2014, and is headquartered in Seoul, South Korea.

Investment focus

Information Technology, Retail, Health Care
Seed, Angel, Grant
South Korea, Australia

Portfolio highlights

J Fun — J Fun is a marketing agency that provides design, video production, and domestic marketing services.
Bredis — Bredis Healthcare provides a variety of solutions for early diagnosis and prognosis monitoring of dementia based on ultrasensitive detection of biomarkers in bodily fluid. We also offer various digital solutions for personalized cognitive training to prevent and treat the disease.
Mockingbird — Mockingbird gives personalized mock exams for the CSAT utilizing an AI item suggestion system.

East Gate Partners

Investment focus

Social, Logistics, Social Network
Seed, Series A
South Korea

Portfolio highlights

Mesh Korea — Mesh Korea is an IT-based logistics startup, which established Korea's first last-mile logistics network and became the primary provider of integrated logistics services with in-house logistics solutions.VROONG, Mesh Korea's logistics brand, creates new value not only by providing delivery services, but also by connecting information.Currently, VROONG provides four services; premium delivery services, 'VROONG Prime', integrated logistics management solution, 'VROONG TMS', premium fresh food delivery services, 'VROONG Fresh', and premium delivery magazine, 'VROONG Collection.'With more than 80 VROONG Stations and 13,000 riders across the nation, VROONG provides faster and more accurate delivery services.
Yea Studio — Yea Studio values positive, sensitive, and passionate attitude and is committed to sharing valuable information globally and making a creative application.

Stonebridge capital, Stonebridge ventures, Specializing in Venture Capital, Private Equity Fund Management

Investment focus

Software, Information Technology, Mobile
Series A, Series B, Funding Round
South Korea, United States, China

Portfolio highlights

Gaonchips — Gaonchips is a chip enterprise that engages in system semiconductor development. They provide an optical solution to clients based on technology. It also provides all solutions necessary for developing and producing massive system semiconductors, ranging from RTL and platform design and verification, DFT insertion, layout, and packaging to testing.
onepredict — We offer a digital brain solution that diagnoses and predicts the status of key industrial assets based on industrial AI and IoT technologies.
OPENEDGES Technology — OPENEDGES Technology, Inc. is the world's only total memory subsystem and AI platform IP provider that delivers NoC interconnect, DDR memory controller, DDR PHY, and NPU IPs.

SparkLabs Global Ventures is a venture capital firm that offers seed-stage investment services to firms in the SaaS, healthcare, education, IoT, fintech, mobile, commerce, HR, gaming, security, and VR industries. It was founded in Dec 2013 and is based in California.Exceptional entrepreneurs, that are building strong, category defining companiesat highly advantageous valuations – can be found anywhere. The company has a team that is highly experienced in finding such talent and helping our entrepreneurs to develop, grow, network, and scale into other markets throughout the world.

Investment focus

Software, Internet, Information Technology
Seed, Series A, Funding Round
United States, South Korea, Singapore

Portfolio highlights

Splab — Manage communities and events and enjoy them like never before. Umoh is a super-connector for participants and provides a powerful dashboard full of insights for event and community managers.
Nitra — Nitra offers expense management software that integrates with the banks to provide innovative loan products.
Tella — Service

Base Investment connects private equity, strategic buyers, and private individuals with opportunities to invest. The company works with well-known, enormous national firms that are looking to acquire a business that will help them extend their brand or make better use of their current facilities.

Investment focus

Information Technology, E-Commerce, B2B
Seed, Series A, Pre-Seed
South Korea, United States

Portfolio highlights

cafe nono — Gathering together for quality discussions. Making your stories stand out. Join the community here and now!
Money Walk — Money Walk is a novel pedometer program that allows users to earn money simply by walking.' Creddy,' the yellow companion who loves to walk, will look after your health and your wallet. Install the Money Walk app right now and you'll be able to catch both health and money.
Building Care — Building Care is a building care management company that provides schedule management, cloud, and building statistics services.

Goodwater empowers exceptional entrepreneurs everywhere to change the world for the better. They believe consumer technology is a force on earth, shaping culture and transforming the global economy at unprecedented speed and scale. They invest in promising entrepreneurs to solve pressing problems. As a combined force, Goodwater companies are aglobal force for change, poised to measurably improve billions of lives.

Investment focus

Financial Services, FinTech, E-Commerce
Seed, Series A, Pre-Seed
United States, India, South Korea

Portfolio highlights

FlowGPT — Discover a vast library of ChatGPT prompts uploaded by the FlowGPT community. Browse popular and useful prompts and get personalized recommendations for prompts that interest you. Join a vibrant community of ChatGPT users and discover, share, and discuss different prompts.
Read AI — Read AI enables better meetings through shared measurement. Read AI is a provider of a real-time shared dashboard that measures engagement and sentiment for meeting attendees.
Cambio — Quickly Resolve Hurtful Accounts Like Collections and Improve Your Credit Score with The Cambio App. Download Today!

Neptune is a UK-based fund management company offering a range of ISA-friendly equity funds to private investors, advisers and institutional clients.

Investment focus

Gaming, Social, Medical
Seed, Series A, Series B
South Korea, United Kingdom

Portfolio highlights

HAEGIN — HAEGIN is a game development company.
Bob Games — A Social casino game developer.
Vaccitech — Vaccitech is a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company engaged in the discovery and development of novel immunotherapeutics and vaccines for the treatment and prevention of infectious diseases and cancer. The company’s proprietary platform comprises proprietary modified simian adenoviral vectors, known as ChAdOx1 and ChAdOx2, as well as thewell-validated Modified Vaccinia Ankara, or MVA, boost vector, both with demonstrable safety profiles and without the ability to replicate in humans. The combination of a ChAdOx prime treatment with subsequent MVA boost has consistently generated significantly higher magnitudes of CD8+ T cells compared with other technologies and approaches. The company has a broad pipeline of both clinical and preclinical stage therapeutic programs in solid tumors and viral infections and prophylactic viral vaccine programs. Vaccitech co-invented a COVID-19 vaccine with the University of Oxford, now approved for use in many territories and exclusively licensed worldwide to AstraZeneca through Oxford University Innovation, or OUI. Vaccitech is entitled to receive a share of the milestones and royalty income received by OUI from AstraZeneca.

Capstone Partners is a venture capital firm specializing in early-stage companies operating in the Information technology, wireless technology, architecture, pharmaceutical, internet, online game, software, solid state disk, and IP television sectors. It primarily invests in China and South Korea, with a focus in Seoul and Gyeonggi province. Thefirm prefers to exit its investments through a trade sale. Capstone Partners was founded in 2008 and is based in Seoul, South Korea.Capstone Partners is a venture capital firm that invests in entrepreneurs seeking success with fresh ideas. Capstone Partners values the funds of union investors better than our own, working for the interests of investors and following the objective of the investments.

Investment focus

Software, Mobile, Gaming
Series A, Seed, Series B
South Korea, United States, India

Portfolio highlights

Aniai — Need robots that can cook some REAL BURGERS, follow your recipe to the letter, and help you to make it even better?
Doongji — Doongji is a small building PM company providing commercial property maintenance and management services.
GlucoFit — GlucoFit offers meals that induce blood sugar rises and helps to regulate blood sugar more effectively and healthily.

POSTECH Venture Capital Corporation(POSTECH VC) was founded and financed by POSCO to participate in SME(small and medium enterprise) Revitalization Policy in 1997 for the National Economy Restoration.We seek investment opportunities in diverse markets including Information Technologies, Advanced Materials, Bio Technologies, Renewable Energy,and Life Sciences.And we are to accelerate the commercialization of the valuable technologies from POSTECH(Pohang University of Science and Technology), RIST(Research institute of Industrial Science and Technology), and other institutes in Korea. More than 200 professors in POSTECH help POSTECH VC evaluate the technologiesPOSTECH VC is comprised of a team consisted of experienced venture capitalists who has previous experiences in successful startups, consulting firms, and executive management.We are currently investing from our several funds and manage over 60 billion Won.Our recent primary investment focus is on high growth opportunities in renewable energy such as bio-diesel and photovoltaic technologies.

Investment focus

Software, Information Technology, Health Care
Series A, Funding Round, Series B
South Korea, United States, China

Portfolio highlights

OKHOME — Pembersihan tanpa ribet, Hemat Waktu, Hidup Jadi Mudah
Deepbrain AI — Deepbrain AI has proven its world-class conversational artificial intelligence technology to be highly utilizing in many areas, including broadcasting, education, and in service industry. State-of-the-art artificial intelligence technology, analogous to real people say, can be applied in a wide variety of areas. Also, it is expected that demandwill increase significantly with differentiated technology in the age of diversification.In recognition of its competitiveness and value, the company has received $2M investment from IDG Capital in 2019, and up to date, it has accumulated $9.5M. In addition, the company is currently growing in partnership with major companies such as Microsoft, Kakao Partner, and SK Telecom. It is expected to accelerate its external growth and profit expansion in the new market as it is set to make inroads into the global market based on its performance so far.
Pluto — Pluto provides a SaaS solution that includes both discovery and academic search engines customized for the institution.

Alumni Partners is a venture capital firm based in South Korea.

Investment focus

E-Commerce, Food Delivery, Delivery Service
Seed, Series A
South Korea

Portfolio highlights

Dalol — Dalol is a bakery that sells snacks, cakes, and rice chips.
DEEPX — DEEPX is a Korean AI hardware system solution company.
Freshstore — We Love To Eat The Fresh Food

Big Basin Capital is a venture capital firm based in Silicon Valley, investing in early-stage startups in Korea and the United States.

Investment focus

E-Commerce, Software, Information Technology
Seed, Series A, Funding Round
South Korea, United States, Singapore

Portfolio highlights

mAy-I — mAy-I is a tech startup that develops advanced human tracking solution based on machine learning techniques.
Lynens — Linenance prioritizes operational excellence by systematizing the entire process, from customer contracts through washing. We believe that operational excellence leads to affordable rates and that reasonable rates lead to customer happiness.
Globaleur — Thousands of travelers from around the world rely on Globaleur for travel. Leverage Globaleur's software and APIs that include dynamic destination data and AI-powered developer tools to change the way we travel the world.