South Korean unicorns such as Viva Republica, Zigbang, Yanolja and Musinsa are expanding their business by acquiring startups and subsidiaries of larger companies.

For example, Viva Republica, which runs Toss, recently acquired Tada in order to expand its business beyond the financial industry and do business in the mobility sector. Tada taxis are expected to provide the easy payment service of Toss and this is likely to be a challenge on the part of Kakao, which is dominating the domestic taxi call service market. Toss became a unicorn three years ago and the recent deal is likely to turn it into a decacorn in the near future.

Yanolja, in the meantime, is aggressively increasing its investment regardless of COVID-19. The Vision Fund of Softbank invested two trillion won in the company in July this year and the company acquired Interpark, the biggest online flight ticket reservation service provider in South Korea, for 294 billion won in September. Previously, Yanolja took over HotelNow in 2016, DailyHotel in 2019 and eZee Technosys as a hotel management company in 2019.

Zigbang, which provides real estate brokerage services, acquired Movill in January this year. Movill was a subsidiary of KakaoPay providing apartment management services such as electronic voting and electronic payment. Last year, Zigbang took over Iood Ventures providing cleaning services and Hogangnono as a real estate market price provider.

Musinsa acquired StyleShare and its subsidiary 29CM for 300 billion won this year. StyleShare covers a wide variety of fashion products, designer goods and luxury goods brands and most of its customers are in the age group of 15 to 25. 29CM provides unique goods from various designer brands and it targets female customers in their 30s and 40s.

Zigbang is currently planning to acquire the home IoT business unit of Samsung SDS. It became the preferred bidder on Oct. 19 and is conducting four-week due diligence. Once the deal is signed, the first proptech startup in South Korea founded 10 years ago can knock on the door of the global smart home market. The company is planning to combine its IoT software capabilities with the hardware technology of the business unit.

Toss launched Toss Payments last year by taking over the payment gateway arm of LG U+ in December 2019. As a result, the annual sales of Toss jumped from 54.8 billion won to 389.8 billion won from 2018 to 2020.

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