[StartupRecipe] How Korean Unicorns Found Two New Growth Paths

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How Korean Unicorns Found Two New Growth Paths

Platforms have lost much of their standing in Korea’s startup investment scene over the past several years. Once the center of the startup ecosystem, platform companies fell out of favor with investors as winner-take-all dynamics, high marketing costs and thin profitability became persistent problems. Capital shifted instead toward AI, semiconductors, robotics and other deep-tech sectors.

But platform companies haven’t disappeared. Korea’s leading platform unicorns have kept growing, relying less on outside investment and more on their own business structures.

Toss and Kurly each logged more than 1 trillion won in revenue in the first half of this year, while Karrot and Musinsa also posted record results. Rather than simply growing user numbers and transaction volume as they once did, these companies are attaching new businesses to their existing platforms and expanding into new markets to find their next source of growth. Their strategies fall into two broad categories: expanding the existing platform, and expanding into new markets.

The first strategy adds new services, categories and revenue streams on top of an already-established user base and platform. Toss is the clearest example. What began as a money-transfer service has evolved into a super-app strategy that pulls banking, securities, insurance and payments into a single app. The record first-half results Toss posted this year were driven in part by growth at Toss Securities and its other financial services. Rather than simply chasing new users, Toss has brought more of its users’ overall financial lives into the platform, creating synergy across its services.

Kurly is expanding the reach of its existing commerce platform in a similar way. Built around Market Kurly and Beauty Kurly, the company has grown its seller-fulfillment and logistics businesses and, through a partnership with Naver, launched Kurly N Mart to create a new customer touchpoint. It’s a strategy built on partnering with another platform that already has a large user base, rather than acquiring new customers from scratch. The rapid growth of Kurly N Mart’s transaction volume in particular suggests that tapping into an existing platform’s customer base can be just as effective a growth strategy for Kurly as bringing in new customers directly.

Karrot, too, has moved well beyond its roots as a secondhand-goods app. The company has expanded into local communities, local advertising and various neighborhood services, broadening the user base that originally gathered for secondhand trading into users of a local lifestyle platform. Musinsa has followed a similar path, growing from an online fashion platform into one with an expanding offline store footprint, while also widening its categories into beauty, kids, home and living.

The second growth axis is expansion into overseas markets. Musinsa is expanding offline and into new categories at home while also investing aggressively in Japan, the United States and Southeast Asia. Beyond simply operating a Korean platform abroad, the company has also positioned itself as a channel for Korean fashion brands to go global — a shift that helped push its first-half exports up ninefold.

Yanolja, which started out as a domestic accommodation-booking platform, is likewise pushing its growth stage onto the global market. The company is expanding into the global travel market while building a new revenue stream through enterprise solutions for the hotel and travel industry.

Yanolja’s global gross transaction value reached 21.4 trillion won in the first half of the year, up 26.8% from a year earlier. To expand globally, the company has pursued acquisitions of overseas businesses, strengthened its inbound platform and pushed its AI-based B2B solutions into overseas markets — moves the company says drove overseas growth in its enterprise solutions business in the first half. That overseas push came at a cost, however: the expense of expanding abroad tipped Yanolja’s operating profit into a loss.

Korea’s platform unicorns are ultimately pursuing growth along two tracks: building new services and revenue streams on their existing platforms, and finding bigger opportunities in new markets. Where a platform company’s competitiveness once came down to how many users and how much transaction volume it could add, the new measures of competitiveness are different — how many different services a platform can connect its existing users to, how far it can extend the strength of its existing platform into new businesses, and how large a market it can capture beyond the limits of Korea’s domestic market.

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