SK Square taps NPS PE expert as global investment head

South Korea’s investment firm SK Square Co. announced on Thursday that it has chosen Harvey Hakjin Bae, a former alternative investment expert at National Pension Service (NPS) of Korea, who served as the head of Americas PE and global hedge funds of its PE and VC investment division. Bae led overseas private equity investment at NPS for 11 years until last month.  

As the new MD of SK Square, Bae will be responsible for finding investment opportunities alongside global investors, creating funds with global private equity firms and finding new portfolio companies.

SK Square participated in creating a 1 trillion won ($774.9 million) fund along with SK Group affiliates SK Hynix Inc. and SK Telecom Co. early this year. SK Square said it will enhance its investment portfolios through the trio’s alliance, which bets on semiconductors, artificial intelligence, blockchain and the metaverse.

Before joining SK Square, Bae started with NPS in 2011 as a private equity investment manager. He worked for the pension fund’s New York office between 2014 and 2017 and led the Private Equity Team II between 2018 and 2019.

Over the past two years, he led the NPS’ private equity investment in the Americas. He is said to have robust networks with some major institutional investors overseas, including the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPPIB), Singapore's sovereign wealth fund GIC and state-holding company Temasek Holdings.

Before NPS, he worked within the financial advisor division at EY Hanyoung, the Korean unit of Ernst & Young Global Ltd. from 2007 to 2010. Bae studied business management at Seoul National University and earned a master's degree in finance from the University of Rochester in New York.

“With Bae, we will speed up investments in semiconductor and next platforms such as AI and the metaverse, as well as attract funding from overseas based on strengthened global investment networks,” said SK Square.

SK Square is a spin-off of Korea’s major telecommunications company SK Telecom. Last November, the company announced it will invest 90 billion won to buy a 35% stake in Korbit, Korea’s leading virtual asset service provider (VASP) for trading in the Korean won currency.

The same month, the investment firm said it will buy a 40% stake in three-dimensional (3D) digital human creator On Mind Inc., a unit of Neptune Company, an affiliate of Kakao Corp. Also, SK Square invested around 35 billion won in homegrown agriculture tech startup Greenlabs last December.  

Last week, the investment firm and SK Telecom jointly injected 50 billion won into Korean metaverse game operator Heagin Co., which developed the metaverse game Play Together. 

Write to Jun-ho Cha at chacha@hankyung.com
Jihyun Kim edited this article.