' Forest of Innovation' grows into a platform that helps large corporations, investors, entrepreneurs, and job seekers make data-based decisions
From startup discovery to post-investment monitoring… Growth support connected with data
K-Beauty Industry Growth Trends Read Through Data Lead to Successful Investment Funds
New features coming in the second half of this year
There is a company that discovers innovative startups, supports their growth, and even makes direct investments. Mark & Company, a startup that also acts as a VC, has data-based startup growth analysis and investment as its core business model.
“If you define a startup as ‘an organization that innovates an industry through technology or services,’ we are innovating the startup ecosystem with data.”
Mark & Company provides both founders and investors with practical insights and acts as a navigator that helps them make better decisions based on data. Through its flagship service, ‘Forest of Innovation,’ it has established a platform to connect startups and investors, and has since launched various data analysis solutions such as Grossfinder and IPMS to build a system to discover and support promising startups. In addition, as an accelerator, it directly executes data-based investments and is creating a healthy startup ecosystem.
Forest of Innovation, Evolving from an Open Innovation Platform to a Navigator of the Startup Ecosystem
Innovation Forest is a data platform that helps investors and large corporations more easily discover and connect with promising startups. It analyzes and provides various data such as the number of monthly unique visitors, transaction amount, employment trends, and investment attraction history for over 15,000 startups. Beyond simply providing corporate information, it supports startups, investors, large corporations, and job seekers, as well as various members of the startup ecosystem, to make better decisions using data. The pronunciation of 'SUP (forest),' which is a combination of the 'start' of startup and the 'up' of growth, contains the vision of 'innovative startups coming together to form a healthy ecosystem.'
The background of the service's creation is Hong Kyung-pyo's experience as the general manager of Hanwha Group's 'Dream Plus' open innovation platform. At the time, he experienced firsthand that large companies wanted open innovation but had difficulty finding promising startups. "The number of companies that people can remember and recommend is limited. So I thought there needed to be a place where promising companies could be gathered and searched."
Innovation Forest started as an open innovation platform that connects startups and investors, but now a wider range of stakeholders are utilizing the data. CEO Hong explained, “One day, when I saw the number of users rapidly increasing, I wondered, ‘This scale is not just for investors.’ After analyzing it, I found that various stakeholders, such as founders, large corporations, salespeople, and job seekers preparing for employment or job changes at startups, were utilizing Innovation Forest data.”
Currently, there are about 8,500 investor members active in the Innovation Forest, and the Innovation Forest data is always included in the IR materials of startups as a basis for market analysis. Entrepreneurs can check and benchmark the growth indicators of their competitors, and investors can explore a wider pool of companies beyond their existing networks. In addition, large companies can discover startups to collaborate with, and job seekers can find and apply for companies that are growing steadily.
Creating a ‘village’ for startup growth… Supporting the entire investment process with data
CEO Hong likens the startup ecosystem that Mark & Company is trying to create to a ‘village.’ “If a startup is like a car, the car needs infrastructure like gas stations (capital) and navigation (data) that guides the way. We provide various infrastructures so that startups can grow more healthily in the startup ecosystem.”
Under this philosophy, Mark & Company is simultaneously developing services and investing, creating the optimal environment for startups to grow. In addition to the Innovation Forest, it is operating startup growth support solutions that utilize data, such as the ‘Growth Finder’ for startup discovery, the ‘Innovation Forest Insight’ for competitiveness analysis, and the ‘IPMS (Innoforest Program Management System)’ that supports post-investment growth monitoring.
'Growth Bridge' is an open innovation program that connects large corporations and startups. Along with the public offering method, it helps large corporations directly discover startups that meet their needs by utilizing data analysis. The 'Growth Finder' solution is applied in the process of discovering startups. It analyzes data from over 15,000 companies to select startups with high growth potential, and you can find growing companies even if you don't know the company name. In addition, you can compare the competitiveness of companies in a specific industry and analyze their strengths and weaknesses through 'Innovation Forest Insight'.
After executing investments in promising companies discovered in this way, the growth status of the companies is automatically monitored through 'IPMS'. CEO Hong explained, "Not only VCs, but also public institutions such as the Ministry of SMEs and Startups and the Korea Institute of Startups and Entrepreneurship Development utilize IPMS to manage the growth of startups they support."
Mark & Company supports startup acceleration based on data. Companies participating in the acceleration program can establish more sophisticated growth strategies based on competitor analysis, strengths and weaknesses analysis data provided by Mark & Company.
' Data-driven, people-based' decision-making… Investment strategy that reads growth trends
Mark & Company uses data to support investment decisions, but the final decision is made by people. Hong explains that it is “data-centric human-driven, not data-driven.” Data is a tool for quantitatively analyzing growth potential, and it is important to combine it with qualitative factors such as the founder’s vision and execution ability to make the final decision.
What is important in investment decisions is the 'trend' of data. Mr. Hong added, "Comparing growth rates compared to the previous month, three months ago, and one year ago, or analyzing the growth rate compared to competitors is key. Through this, investors can prioritize companies that should be invested in now and companies that should be watched in the future."
This approach has also been applied to actual investment strategies. A representative example is the creation of the 'Beauty Intelligence Fund' by predicting the growth potential of the K-beauty industry in 2023 through data analysis. "When we analyzed the data two years ago, we realized that the growth of the beauty market was extraordinary. We prepared investments based on this, and it met the trend of the times and led to the formation of the fund." Based on this analysis, we invested in Deeppoint (men's hair product brand 'For Beauty') and Veramore (early-stage anti-aging beauty brand 'Veramore'). CEO Hong stated that he plans to expand the data-based investment strategy and apply it to various industries in the future.
Creating a healthier startup ecosystem with data
“As data accumulates, it becomes important to analyze and process it to create better insights. With the same manpower, more sophisticated policies and programs can be designed, and ultimately, a healthier startup ecosystem will be created.” Mark & Company has proven this. In the future, we plan to further advance data analysis and support more companies to grow. Starting in the second half of this year, we plan to shorten the data provision cycle, which was previously disclosed on a monthly basis, to provide data that is closer to real-time. The additionally disclosed data will allow startups to analyze their competitors more precisely. Functions and data that allow investors and large corporations to better find new companies will also be added.
CEO Hong emphasized, “We want to become a platform that actually contributes to the growth of startups,” and “Our role is to help founders focus on their main business and to help their performance be properly evaluated in the market.” Mark & Company will continue to provide data and support startups so that entrepreneurs who dream of innovation can take on challenges. Starting from the Forest of Innovation, it is expected that more startups will have opportunities for growth in the ‘Village of Innovation’ created by Mark & Company.
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