SBI Investment Drives Portfolio IPOs... Investment Results Becoming Visible

Leading domestic venture capital (VC) firm SBI Investment is seeing its early-stage investment portfolio companies move forward with initial public offerings (IPOs).

According to SBI Investment on September 3, autonomous driving artificial intelligence (AI) company RideFlux submitted a preliminary KOSDAQ listing review request to the Korea Exchange on August 14. This comes three months after the company received an A rating from both specialized technology evaluation agencies designated by the Korea Exchange in May. Korea Investment & Securities and Woori Investment & Securities are serving as joint lead underwriters.

Based in Jeju, RideFlux is a technology company that independently develops a full-stack AI software for Level 4 autonomous driving, covering perception, judgment, control, and high-precision mapping. The company holds the only domestic permit for unmanned autonomous vehicle test operations, and in April became the first in Korea to receive a permit for paid autonomous freight transportation. Since July, it has partnered with Hanjin and Lotte Global Logistics to conduct robo-truck freight transport, further expanding its business scope into the logistics market.

SBI Investment, recognizing the paradigm shift toward unmanned transport mobility and RideFlux’s technological prowess, made its first investment in 2020 and has participated in two funding rounds to date.

SelectStar, an AI data and reliability evaluation company in which SBI Investment participated in the Series B round last year, also passed the technical evaluation for KOSDAQ tech-special listing in July. The company aims to submit its preliminary listing examination request within the year. SelectStar provides 'Datumo Service,' which designs and builds training and evaluation data tailored to companies’ AI development and adoption needs, as well as 'Datumo Platform,' which enables everything from evaluation data generation to performance and safety assessment within a single environment.

Yeonggwang YKMC, based in South Chungcheong Province and specializing in precision machining and surface treatment technologies used in semiconductor and display equipment and components, also filed for a preliminary listing examination for KOSDAQ in July. In the semiconductor and display materials and components sector, where a small number of companies dominate the market, SBI Investment has participated since Yeonggwang YKMC’s Series A round in 2020, focusing on the company's proprietary technological competitiveness and potential for customer base expansion.

A representative from SBI Investment stated, “Rather than targeting the listing of portfolio companies as an end in itself, our priority is to help promising companies that can drive industry change build sufficient competitiveness in the market,” adding, “We will continue to identify market-leading companies early, and enhance corporate value together through investments tailored to each stage of growth.”

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.