South Korea's retail property technology startup Sweet Spot attracted a Series B investment of 9.5 billion won ($7.7 million) from venture capital and construction companies. It plans to strengthen its position as a retail proptech company with the investment.
New investors including Shinsegae Group’s corporate venture capital firm Signite Partners, Hanwha Investment & Securities, Hana Securities, ES Investor, Woomi Construction, Son & Company, Tigris, and existing shareholder Altos Ventures participated in the funding.
Starting in 2015 as a brokerage service provider for pop-up stores, which open suddenly and usually exist for a short period of time usually in idle spaces of commercial buildings, Sweet Spot specializes in providing large-scale arcade merchandising consulting and brokerage services.
Sweet Spot will use the proceeds to build and upgrade a commercial real estate library system based on tenants (stores) and develop retail asset management SaaS.
Sweet Spot has proven its high profitability across the entire retail market, including commercial real estate leasing and merchandising consulting, along with its flagship business model pop-up stores.
It led various rental agency projects such as "Seongsu Naknak," a cultural complex space in Seongsu-dong, "Yoido Finance Tower," and "Sheraton D Cube City" in Sindorim, all in Seoul, revitalizing commercial districts and establishing them as local landmarks.
Through all these, Sweet Spot broke even in the second half of 2021 and grew more than 300% last year, exceeding sales revenue before the outbreak of COVID-19.
“We highly appreciate the founder’s quick performance by combining the know-how in commercial real estate, which is his best area of expertise, with proptech,” said Lim Jung-min, general manager of Signite Partners, who led the funding.
“With this investment, we can carry out data-based retail curation custom-tailored to each commercial district,” said Kim Jeong-soo, CEO of Sweet Spot.
“We will also plan to expand our business to such areas as retail asset management SaaS so that our tenants can earn stable profit with simplified operating costs,” he added.
Write to Jong-Woo Kim at
jongwoo@hankyung.com
