Ridi becomes first Korean content platform unicorn

Ridi Corp., often referred to as South Korea's Kindle, has received funding of 120 billion won ($100 million) from Singapore's GIC and three domestic institutional investors at a valuation of 1.6 trillion won ($1.3 billion), the company said on Monday.

With the latest funding, Ridi has become the first unicorn startup among the country's content platforms, as its estimated corporate value topped $1 billion.

GIC led the funding round as the anchor investor and became the Korean startup's first foreign shareholder, Ridi said in a statement.

The Singaporean sovereign wealth fund put a high value on Ridi's competitive position in the online content market and the growth potential for its global subscription-based webtoon service Manta Comics, launched in November 2020, according to the company.

“This funding round is meaningful in that we attracted our first foreign investor,” Ridi said in the statement. 

“We will spend the money to strengthen our global business competitiveness. We will invest in creating original content and a value chain based on our intellectual property rights, from web novels to webtoons, videos and OSTs (original soundtracks).”

Ridi was seeking overseas investors to expand its global footprint. In particular, it is looking to provide its rich intellectual property to over-the-top (OTT) platforms such as Netflix Inc. and Disney Plus.

OTHER INVESTORS

Among Ridi's existing investors, state-run Korea Development Bank (KDB) and Seoul-based Atinum Investment took part in the new funding round. NVestor, another Korean investment firm, was added to the list of investors.

Since investing 3 billion won in Ridi in a Series B funding in 2013, Atinum has been steadily increasing its stake in the country's leading platform of e-books, web novels and webtoons.

In 2020, Ridi received 5.5 billion won in investment from Atinum and 20 billion won from KDB's startup financing department.

The latest funding brought the accumulated investments it has received so far to 192.5 billion won.

PIONEER IN E-BOOK MARKET

As a pioneer in the country’s e-book market, it enjoyed a decade of great success as an e-book platform.

In 2018, it ventured out into the web novel segment in search of a new growth driver and adopted an episode format, uploading a new episode every week, instead of releasing the original content as complete e-books.

With 3.5 million cumulative subscribers, it topped 2.1 billion won in daily transaction value as of December 2021.

Its global webtoon service Manta has already boasted 3 million downloads after one year of its release.

Ridi posted sales growth 44 quarters in a row as of the third quarter of last year.

For the first nine months to September 2021, its revenue logged a 37% on-year growth to 149.1 billion won, according to its latest data available.

For full-year 2020, the company's revenue exceeded the 100 billion won mark for the first time since its inception in 2008, jumping 37% on-year to 153.8 billion won.

Write to So-Hyun Lee at y2eonlee@hankyung.com
Yeonhee Kim edited this article.