Korea's Viva Republica raises USD 225m
Viva Republica, operator of the Korean money transfer app Toss, has raised KRW 296bn (USD 225.5m) in series G funding from an investor group that includes Altos Ventures, Goodwater Capital, Greyhound Capital, and Kleiner Perkins.
The company sold 5.85m shares priced at KRW 50,500 apiece, according to a filing. The post-money valuation, based on the total number of issued shares disclosed in the filing, appears to be KRW 8.5trn (USD 6.4bn). When Viva raised KRW 460bn in June 2021, the valuation was around USD 7.2bn – a threefold increase from the previous round of USD 173m just 10 months earlier.
Altos and Korea Development Bank (KDB) are the largest investors in the latest round, each contributing KRW 100bn. Altos is one of the company's earliest backers, while KDB is re-upping from the previous round, to which it also contributed KRW 100bn. Goodwater, Greyhound, and Kleiner Perkins are also existing investors.
Other participants included Duke University's endowment, Axiom Asia, Gwangju Bank, KTBN Venture, Mirae Asset Securities, and FinSight Ventures.
Viva has raised more than USD 1.3bn to date and also counts the likes of Alkeon Capital – which led the previous round – Sequoia Capital China, Aspex Management, GIC, Bessemer Venture Partners, Ribbit Capital, Qualcomm Ventures, KTB Network, Partech Ventures, and PayPal as investors.
Toss, a P2P service said to have been used by one-third of Korea's population, facilitates money transfers in three steps with a single password entry. It has capitalised on Korea's relatively underdeveloped traditional payments infrastructure, where even the smallest online banking transfers can require several password checks and dozens of clicks.
The app had 18m users and had facilitated transfers amounting to KRW 630bn as of December 2022, according to the Toss website. In addition to transfers, services include budget management, loan issuance through third-party banks, stock trading, and bill payment. In the past year, Toss has launched a securities house and a digital bank.
Most recently, Toss acquired Merchant Korea, a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) that leases wireless capacity from the major domestic telecom operators and sells it to consumers at below retail market prices.
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