Viva Republica, the operator of the mobile financial platform Toss App, could become the ‘Decacorn’ startup or a company with a valuation of $10 billion or 12 trillion won as it attracts fresh investment. The Korean unicorn startup got 460 billion won or $407.5 million funding recently, with its valuation at 8.2 trillion won or $7.4 billion.
In this investment round, KDB, a national bank, and Alkeon Capital Management, an American investment company, made investments worth 100 billion won and 84 billion won, respectively, as major investors. In addition, Toss’ existing investors Altos Ventures and Greyhound Capital also participated.
Alkyon Capital is an investor with an investment portfolio centered on tech companies and is a major shareholder of Square, one of America’s leading FinTech companies, and big tech companies such as Google Alphabet and Facebook. It has a philosophy of investing mainly in the early stages of corporate growth and holding it for a long time.
Super-App status helps increase revenues
Toss, which became a unicorn company with an enterprise value of $1 billion (1.2 trillion won) in 2018, is now pegged to be a Decacorn company in three years. The company’s value has tripled in 10 months after attracting investment last year. Toss provides personal financial services such as banking and securities in one app based on 20 million users. It also offers B2C and B2B business services through Toss Payments, a top-tier affiliate in the PG industry. Toss is amongst very few FinTech companies globally with a diverse portfolio in all fields of finance.
Toss’ ‘Super-App’ strategy of providing all financial services in one app is its core competitiveness. ‘Toss Securities,’ an affiliated company, provides stock trading services on the Toss app without installing a separate app and is showing record growth by attracting 3.5 million accumulated accounts within three months of its full-scale launch in March 2021. The company recently entered banking services through Toss Bank, which will start operations soon.
Latest investment to push growth
There are 11 million monthly active users on the Toss app, the most among domestic financial company apps. Toss also has operations in Vietnam since 2019, and it has 3 million monthly active users.
Viva Republica will use the latest investment to support the growth of affiliates and Toss’ infrastructure growth. Seung-Gun Lee, CEO of Toss explained, “Korea has the highest level of financialization per household in banking, card, insurance, etc. in the world, and the speed of digital transformation of finance is rapidly increasing after Covid-19, so the growth opportunity of the mobile financial platform is very large.” he emphasized, “With Toss as a direct player in key areas such as banking and securities, we can design financial services and products from a customer perspective.”
Toss, which recorded approximately 390 billion won or $343 million in sales last fiscal year, expects to exceed 1 trillion won or $88 billion in consolidated sales this year along with full-scale growth of its affiliates.
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