South Korea's Ticket Monster raises $115m

The round includes a $44 million contribution from domestic private equity firm Simone Investment Managers. Additional participation came from existing shareholders, including KKR and global sovereign wealth funds.

According to The Wall Street Journal, the deal values Ticket Monster at about $1.3 billion and thus represents a down-round after a KRW47.5 billion ($42 million) commitment last year from online gaming provider NHN Entertainment (NHNE) valued the company at $1.5 billion. Although the NHNE deal was touted at the time as the first tranche in a larger $300 million capital raising exercise, AVCJ understands that the latest investment is an unrelated transaction.

The lower valuation has been interpreted as a symptom of both recent inflation in technology markets and the difficulties around valuation reliability among young tech companies. In 2016, Ticket Monster was said to be worth about twice as much as it was in 2015, when an investment by a KKR and Anchor Equity Partners-led consortium pegged the company at around $782 million.

That round saw the consortium take a 46% stake in Ticket Monster on a fully diluted basis for $350 million. Online retailer Groupon – which bought the company in 2013 for $260 million from US-based LivingSocial – retained a 42% holding. A number of co-investors participated in the deal, including Canada Pension Plan Investment Board and Temasek Holdings-owned Pavilion Capital.

Founded in 2010, Ticket Monster sells a variety of discounted consumer goods through its mobile app, and provides services such as plane ticket booking. In 2017, 80% of the company’s transactions were completed on mobile devices. It is not yet profitable, but reportedly saw sales increase 46% year-on-year in 2016 to KRW286 billion.

“This is a significant milestone for Tmon [Ticket Monster] because our new and existing partners have affirmed their confidence in our business and support our vision to change the e-commerce customer experience through our ‘technology and platform’ approach,” Ticket Monster CEO Daniel Shin said in a statement. “We are thrilled to have the opportunity to explore new and exciting areas of growth — such as mobile grocery shopping and online travel — with these world-class partners by our side.”

Ticket Monster’s expansion into new verticals represents and attempt to differentiate itself from domestic counterparts Wemakeprice and Coupang. The latter was valued at $5 billion following a $1 billion commitment from Japan’s Softbank Corp. Online retail sales in Korea are estimated to have tripled since 2010 and reached about KRW65 billion last year. This compares to about KRW54 trillion in 2015.

Simone Investment Managers claims capital under management of KRW1 trillion. It manages a number of European and US real estate funds as well as a global venture capital vehicle targeting financial technology and IT start-ups.

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• Topics
• North Asia
• Technology
• Consumer
• Expansion
• South Korea
• Growth capital
• TMT