Sweet Spot leading in pop-up store brokerage in Korea, attracts Series B investment

Korean retail proptech startup Sweet Spot has attracted a total investment of 9.5 billion won ($7.7 million) from venture capital and construction companies. It plans to focus on strengthening its position as a retail prop tech company with the investment. This investment was carried out in two rounds, and the Series B investment was completed by paying a total of 7.5 billion won ($6 million) this month.

Shinsegae Group’s venture capital firms Signite Partners, Hanwha Investment & Securities, Hana Securities, ES Investor, Woomi Construction, Son & Company, Tigris, and existing shareholders Altos Ventures participated in the investment for the third consecutive time.

With this investment, Sweet Spot will build and upgrade a commercial real estate library system based on tenants (stores) and pop-up store database (DB) accumulated since its establishment, commercial real estate asset and facility management, commercial real estate purchase and sale advisory, retail asset management SaaS development.

In particular, during the Covid-19 pandemic, Sweet Spot has proven its high profitability in the market by covering the entire retail industry, including commercial real estate leasing and MD consulting, along with pop-up stores, which were its flagship business model.

Representatively, it leads various rental agency projects such as ‘Seongsu Naknak,’ a complex cultural space in Seongsu-dong, ‘Yeouido Finance Tower,’ and ‘Sheraton D Cube City’ in Sindorim, and fills the space with different contents to revitalize the commercial district.

Sweet Spot had grown by more than 300% on average annually, exceeding sales before the outbreak of Corona 19, and broke even in the second half of 2021 (BEP).

Lim Jung-min, general manager of Signite Partners, who led the investment, said, “We highly appreciated the fact that the founder is achieving rapid results in the market by utilizing commercial real estate.”

“With this investment, we can transparently disclose sales, floating population, ratings, etc., by establishing a tenant library and carrying out retail curation tailored to each commercial district based on the data,” said Kim Jeong-soo, CEO of Sweet Spot. “In addition, we will strive to expand our business to tenants and streamline operating costs.”

Established in 2015, Sweet Spot specializes in providing large-scale arcade MD consulting and brokerage services, starting with a brokerage service that can install a pop-up store in an idle space of a commercial building and plans to accelerate the digital transformation of the retail business this year.

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