Korea's Daesung Private Equity raises $85m metaverse fund

The Daesung Metaverse Scale-Up Fund was established in conjunction with a fund-of-funds under Korea Venture Investment Corporation (KVIC), which is also participating as an LP, according to local media. Industrial Bank of Korea and Shinhan Capital will contribute a further KRW 60bn, alongside Daesung Holdings and two more of its affiliates, Daesung Energy and Daesung Clean Energy.

Daesung Private Equity claims this is the largest dedicated metaverse fund in Korea. The country has already seen some sizeable metaverse-related PE investments. Late last year, Naver Z, the metaverse unit of Naver Corporation, closed a KRW 223.6bn round. This was followed by a KRW 100bn investment in VA Corporation, a virtual content provider positioning itself as a metaverse platform.

The new fund will focus on companies that leverage digital technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), extended reality (XR), blockchain, and digital twins. A digital twin is a digital representation of a physical product, system, or process that serves as its effectively indistinguishable digital counterpart of it for purposes such as simulation, integration, testing, monitoring, and maintenance.

"Metaverse is already considered to be an industry-wide game changer rather than being simply a newly emerging field," said Younghoon Kim, group chairman of Daesung Group, Korea JoongAng Daily reported. "Through this fund, Daesung Group will hold a strategic leadership position in the growth of the metaverse.”

Daesung Private Equity was established in 1987 and has operated under several different names, including Insight Venture and Binext Private Equity. It became a subsidiary of Daesung Group in 2002. The firm has invested KRW 4.5trn across 450 companies to date. It has previously backed the likes of game developers Krafton and Shiftup, cryptocurrency exchange Dunamu, and education app Riiid.

Last year, Riiid, which claims to use deep-learning algorithms to develop personalised education programmes, raised a USD 175m round led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2.

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• Topics
• North Asia
• Fundraising
• Venture
• Technology
• South Korea
• Korea Venture Investment Corporation (KVIC)
• Fundraising
• metaverse