While the venture investment market is frozen due to the liquidity cold wave, the number of small investments in the Seed-Series A stage has increased. The industry believes that venture capitalists (VCs) have chosen small investments of less than 1 billion won instead of large-scale investments amid frozen investor sentiment.
According to a recent report published by Startup Alliance, a startup public-private partnership agency, the amount of startup investment in July was 836.8 billion won, down 72.71% from the same period last year (3.659 trillion won). The amount of investment in August was also 862.8 billion won, similar to the previous month. This is a decrease of 19.12% compared to August last year.
The overall size of the investment shrank, but rather the number of small investments less than 1 billion increased. In August, 98 investments were made less than 1 billion won or did not disclose their investments. It increased significantly compared to 65 cases during the same period last year. Of the total number of venture and startup investments made during this period, 65.13% were investments that were less than 1 billion won in size or did not disclose their investments.
On the other hand, the number of investments worth more than 1 billion won and less than 10 billion won per month in August was 35, down significantly from 53 in August last year. The number of investments worth more than 10 billion won also decreased from 19 to 11. In terms of percentage compared to the total investment size, investments worth more than 1 billion won and less than 10 billion won decreased from 39.17% to 23.03%, and investments worth more than 10 billion won decreased from 15.83% to 7.24%.
Most of the startups that recently announced the news of attracting investment are in the seed-series A stage. Examples include sports vertical platform “Astler” △ AI real-time motion recognition-based virtual character rendering startup “Plumdi” △ airplane safety diagnosis and solution development startup “Wiflow.” These companies announced that they would attract seed investment, but did not disclose the specific amount of investment.
Among the places that disclosed the investment amount are △ Artificial Intelligence-based bio startup “Actnova” △ Culture and Arts Startup “Culture and Art for You.” Actnova attracted 500 million won worth of seed investment from Kakao Ventures, and culture and art for you received 1 billion won from Krypton and KST-Shinhan Capital.
