[StartupRecipe] Korea’s Unicorns Are Finally Making Money

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Korea’s Unicorns Are Finally Making Money

Korea’s leading unicorn startups have crossed a significant threshold. After years of chasing growth at the expense of profits, 2025 marked the year many of them demonstrated that sustainable, revenue-generating business models are not just possible — they are real.

Where 2024 was broadly characterized as a year of loss reduction and cautious optimism, 2025 delivered something more concrete: actual profitability. Across the cohort, three distinct trends emerged — loss-making companies turning their first profits, already-profitable companies accelerating their margins, and early returns from global expansion bets. Yet the headline story may be the growing divide between those at the top and everyone else.

Six unicorns now sit above the 1 trillion won annual revenue mark: Toss (2.698 trillion won), Kurly (2.367 trillion), Megazone Cloud (1.749 trillion), Dunamu (1.557 trillion), Musinsa (1.467 trillion), and Yanolja (1.029 trillion). Two of those — Megazone Cloud and Yanolja — are new entrants to the club compared to 2024. Revenue growth was broad-based, with only Dunamu posting a decline, down 10% amid a slowdown in crypto trading volumes tied to global economic headwinds. At the other end of the spectrum, Karrot surged 43% and Toss grew 38%, both standout performances in a challenging consumer environment. Kurly and Ridi grew at a more modest pace — 7.8% and 7% respectively — but both companies made meaningful strides in cost discipline, translating modest top-line growth into significantly improved bottom lines.

The most closely watched development was the profitability turnaround. Kurly and Megazone Cloud both swung to operating profit in 2025, a milestone that had eluded both companies for years. Zigbang has not yet crossed that line on an annual basis — it reported an operating loss of 28.7 billion won for the full year — but it recorded a standalone operating profit of 300 million won in the first quarter of 2025, a meaningful signal that a full-year turnaround may be within reach.

However, not all profits are created equal. The gap in operating margins within the unicorn cohort is striking. Dunamu continues to operate at a level most companies can only aspire to, posting an operating margin of 56% despite a year-over-year decline in absolute profit, from 1.186 trillion won in 2024 to 869.3 billion won in 2025. Toss delivered an operating profit of 336 billion won at a 12.5% margin, while Musinsa posted 140.5 billion won at 9.6%.

By contrast, Kurly’s operating profit of 13.1 billion won translates to a margin of just 0.6%, and Megazone Cloud’s EBITDA margin sits in the low single digits. Both companies deserve credit for reaching profitability — but the distance between their margins and those of peers like Dunamu and Toss underscores how much work remains.

Dig into the drivers behind the strongest performers and two themes stand out: advertising revenue and international growth.

Toss, Karrot, and Ohouse all flagged advertising revenue as a primary engine of improvement — a sign that these platforms have built audiences large and engaged enough to monetize through ads at meaningful scale. For companies with established user bases, advertising is emerging as a high-margin layer that can be grown without proportional increases in cost.

Global expansion, meanwhile, is becoming a strategic imperative for unicorns bumping up against the limits of the Korean domestic market. Musinsa reported that its overseas global store export performance grew more than tenfold year-on-year. Yanolja hit an all-time high in global gross merchandise value. Ridi and Karrot also cited international momentum as a key growth factor. For companies in maturing domestic categories, foreign revenue is no longer a side story — it is increasingly the main one.

Not every company in the cohort is on the same trajectory. Kream, Ably, Zigbang, and Ridi all continued to report operating losses in 2025. The reasons vary: some reflect deliberate investment in new business lines that have yet to generate returns; others, like Zigbang, face structural headwinds from a prolonged downturn in the Korean real estate market. These are not necessarily signs of failure, but they serve as a reminder that the path to profitability is neither linear nor guaranteed.

The overall picture is one of a startup ecosystem growing up. Korea’s unicorns are no longer purely story stocks — many are now generating real profits, and the best among them are doing so at scale. But maturity is arriving unevenly, and the gap between the most profitable companies and those still finding their footing is, if anything, getting wider.

The next phase of competition will likely be defined not by who can grow revenues fastest, but by who can build the most durable and high-margin business model — and increasingly, by who can make that work beyond Korea’s borders.

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