The Ministry of SMEs and Startups (Minister Han Sung-sook, hereinafter referred to as the Ministry of SMEs and Startups) announced on Monday the 1st that it had selected 15 potential unicorn companies that will lead the global market.
The Pre-Unicorn Special Guarantee is a program that provides scale-up funds of up to KRW 20 billion to foster global unicorn companies. This year, 79 companies applied, showing great interest with a competition rate of 5.3:1.
This year, a large number of companies with outstanding innovation and growth potential were selected through fierce competition. The average sales were 23.3 billion won, the number of employees was 74, the investment attracted was 35.2 billion won, and the corporate value was 113.4 billion won.
Travel Wallet Co., Ltd., selected this time, is a global payment platform company that provides overseas payments, currency exchange, and remittances. It was recognized for its innovation in resolving inconveniences such as high fees and long processing times of existing banks, as well as its growth potential since its launch in 2021.
Liner Inc., which provides the AI search and deep research service 'LINER', has been recognized for its innovation by ranking first in the world in the SimpleQA benchmark that evaluates the reliability of artificial intelligence models. It is also expanding its overseas market share by targeting American universities, and is expected to grow into a global AI company.
Starting this year, we have introduced a new "Performance-Linked Guarantee System," which allows companies to receive additional guarantees without separate screening when they achieve certain performance goals in areas such as "follow-up investment" and "sales," thereby providing convenience to companies and motivating them to make follow-up investments and grow sales.
The Ministry of SMEs and Startups selected 126 potential unicorns from 2019 to 2024 as part of its prospective unicorn project and provided special guarantees worth 797.2 billion won.
As a result of measuring the performance of the 126 selected companies as of the end of 2024, sales increased by 174.0% and the number of employees increased by 44.7% compared to the time of selection, and 90 of them attracted follow-up investment of 5.2 trillion won.
In particular, eight companies have become unicorns, and 13 companies have been listed on the KOSDAQ market.
Minister of SMEs and Startups Han Sung-sook said, “The special guarantee program for potential unicorns has established itself as a representative scale-up program by achieving results such as numerous successful IPOs and growth into unicorn companies,” and added, “We will do our best to ensure that potential unicorn companies can become key players in our economic growth.”
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