Kakao focuses on digital healthcare in new startup investments this year

[Source : Kakao Ventures]

Kakao Ventures has made new and follow-up investments worth 50 billion won ($39 million) in 43 startups this year alone, focusing on digital healthcare, the venture investment arm of Kakao Corp. said on Tuesday.

A chunk of the investments went to companies at very early or early stages of their lifecycle with 84 percent for seed funding (22 cases), Pre-Series A (9 cases) and Series A (5 cases). Later round investments such as Series B or beyond (seven cases) accounted for 16 percent.

Among the startups, 31 grabbed fresh investment from Kakao, a slight increase from 28 in the previous year, and 25 of them welcomed Kakao Ventures as their first institutional investor.

By sector, digital healthcare startups took up the most with about 45 percent, with 14 cases based on new investment. Key examples of digital healthcare include medical software used by hospitals for diagnostic and treatment purposes, such as medical AI and digital therapeutics, and technology that processes biological big data.

In terms of investment amount, the service sector topped the list with 24.2 billion won, followed by the deep tech sector with about 15 billion won. Deep tech refers to fundamental breakthroughs with scalability that impact industries and people’s lives, such as drones, AI, and image processing.

Meanwhile, two of the startups that Kakao Ventures invested in earlier, Shift Up and Korea Credit Data, became unicorns this year.