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Premier Partners

Premier Partners, LLC is a venture capital firm specializing in investments in early stage, start-ups, expansion capital, growth capital, and middle market. The firm primarily invests in LED, display, biotechnology, healthcare, medical equipment, electronic components, computer, electricity, machinery, telecommunications equipment, online game, distribution, alternative energy, and plant and heavy industrial sectors. It invests in companies based in South Korea. The firm usually exist investments through a variety of routes: flotation, mergers and acquisitions, trade sale, or shadow listing. Premier Partners, LLC was founded in 2005 and is based in Seoul, South Korea.
JC

Joonyoun Cho

Managing Partner

SC

Sung-In Chung

Co-CEO and Managing Partner

SC

Sungin Chung

Managing Partner / CEO

SK

Seong-eun Kim

Partner and VP

SK

Seong Kim

Managing Partner

JL

Jong-ho Lee

Partner / MD

DL

Donghoon Lee

Managing Partner

JS

Jay Song

Managing Partner / CEO

HS

Hyeok-jin Song

Co-CEO and Managing Partner

33 past transactions

Aardvark Therapeutics

Series A in 2019
Aardvark Therapeutics, Inc. operates as a biopharmaceutical company, which engages in the development and commercialization of small molecule therapeutics for the treatment of obesity and metabolic diseases. Its product Bittera, is a first-in-class oral composition that selectively disrupts hunger signaling and regulates energy homeostasis. The company was incorporated in 2017 and is based in San Diego, California.

Fast Five

Series A in 2016
Fast Five is a premium SOHO office business center that aims to become an offline social network based on Fast Five membership. FAST FIVE is a membership-based premium SOHO office that offers a great business space at a reasonable price without deposit. At FAST FIVE, they aim to become an offline social network that creates a strong bond through a community manager who resides to create friends and partners with famous people from various fields such as founders, investors, professionals, and freelancers.

AITRICS

Series A in 2020

Eineblume Co., Ltd

Venture Round in 2020
Eineblume Co., Ltd designs and develops Chatie application through which users can chat with each other. The company is based in Seoul, South Korea.

LUNASOFT

Series B in 2020
LUNASOFT INC. develops chatbots and an integrated management platform for customer support. The company develops Luna Plus, a courier exchange platform; Luna Plus Mobile, a real time business consultation solution; Luna Plus CTI, a customer counselling platform that integrates phone counselling, intelligent chat counselling; and customer consultation chatbots for the Naver and Kakao platforms. LUNASOFT INC. was founded in 2016 and is based in Seoul, South Korea.

jeongyookgak

Series C in 2021

Musicow, Inc.

Series B in 2020
Musicow, Inc. owns and operates an online platform that allows musical artists to share their copyright with fans, allowing the fans to invest in their music and receive royalties. The company through its platform enable users to bid on the creations of music available on the platform and earn royalties on the basis of times the song is streamed and used. Musicow, Inc. was founded in 2017 and is based in Seoul, South Korea.

jeongyookgak

Series B in 2020

RIDI

Series C in 2017
RIDI Corporation is South Korea’s leading e-reading services company, headquartered in Seoul. Eyeing remarkable success for the innovation of reading experiences, the company operates Ridibooks e-book store and provides PAPER PRO. Ridibooks provides the highest quality of reading experience through e-book viewer applications, with a wide selection of e-book contents. The service is available for Ridibooks PAPER PRO (self-developed e-ink reader), iOS, Android, Windows and Mac OS X. Ridibooks now serves more than 2.77 million users and more than 1,620,000 e-book titles until today. PAPER PRO, developed by RIDI Corporation and released in December 2017, is Korea’s first 7.8-inch e-reader. PAPER PRO’s size is optimized for reading, and features an e-ink display that resembles paper books.

Zikooin Company

Series A in 2021
Zikooin Company produces and supplies vegetable meat made from discarded grains. The company is based in Seoul, South Korea.

Xangle

Series B in 2022
Xangle collects, verifies, and integrates corporate disclosures from global projects and companies that have issued crypto assets. This information is made public along with on-chain blockchain data, all of which are displayed in a user-friendly format to help the public’s understanding of the crypto assets. One of the key issues concerning on-chain data is the difficulty associated with analyzing raw data. Xangle provides both off-chain corporate disclosures and easily accessible on-chain metrics and analytics to the public.

KaliVir Immunotherapeutics

Series A in 2022

Socar

Series C in 2018
Socar is a Korean eco-friendly car sharing community that allows travelers to share cars with others who are traveling the same route. Socar has raised an $18 million round of funding in 2015 which was one of the highest funding deals for a South Korean startup to date. Most notably, it was led by a US investor: Bain Capital, a private investment firm with $80 billion in assets under management. Socar was founded in March 2012, and it has a website and smartphone apps that let users book cars for their own use. Service has over 1,700,000 registered users, 50,000 of whom use the service each month. Around 80,000 transactions per month — that’s more than one car booking each 30 seconds.

Supergene

Series B in 2019
Supergene is a social content and HTML5 game development company based in Pangyo, South Korea, and Manila, Philippines. Having launched more than 30 instant games on the Facebook Gaming platform, Supergene develops and operates Facebook Gaming platform-based instant games and a social matching service, namely Signal, The Puzzle, OMG, OMG AR, Puzzle Wizard, and Super Pop. Especially, OMG has been No. 1 game by MAU, marking 300 million once in 2020, among entire games on Facebook Game platform.

Iksuda Therapeutics

Series A in 2021
Creating a new generation of biological therapeutics through advanced glycosylation technologies Glythera Limited is a young spin-out biotechnology company from the University of Bath with core expertise in protein/peptide functionalisation and glycosylation technologies, imparting improved pharmacokinetic properties to biological therapeutics. Glythera successfully raised its first round of investment in 2008, with research operations being conducted in dedicated laboratories situated on the campus of the University of Bath

Upstage AI

Series A in 2021
Upstage AI is an artificial intelligence (AI) startup that helps companies focus on their core businesses.

Iksuda Therapeutics

Venture Round in 2021
Creating a new generation of biological therapeutics through advanced glycosylation technologies Glythera Limited is a young spin-out biotechnology company from the University of Bath with core expertise in protein/peptide functionalisation and glycosylation technologies, imparting improved pharmacokinetic properties to biological therapeutics. Glythera successfully raised its first round of investment in 2008, with research operations being conducted in dedicated laboratories situated on the campus of the University of Bath

RIDI

Series D in 2016
RIDI Corporation is South Korea’s leading e-reading services company, headquartered in Seoul. Eyeing remarkable success for the innovation of reading experiences, the company operates Ridibooks e-book store and provides PAPER PRO. Ridibooks provides the highest quality of reading experience through e-book viewer applications, with a wide selection of e-book contents. The service is available for Ridibooks PAPER PRO (self-developed e-ink reader), iOS, Android, Windows and Mac OS X. Ridibooks now serves more than 2.77 million users and more than 1,620,000 e-book titles until today. PAPER PRO, developed by RIDI Corporation and released in December 2017, is Korea’s first 7.8-inch e-reader. PAPER PRO’s size is optimized for reading, and features an e-ink display that resembles paper books.

Superb AI

Series B in 2022
Superb AI is a Machine Learning data platform that creates, manipulates, and manages data without building custom tools. It uses proprietary deep learning AI that assists humans to achieve faster labeling of images and videos by splitting training data into smaller components. Superb AI was founded in 2018 and is headquartered in San Mateo, California.

Bluehole

Venture Round in 2014
Krafton is a game developer for PC and mobile devices that focuses on fantasy games.

Aardvark Therapeutics

Series B in 2021
Aardvark Therapeutics, Inc. operates as a biopharmaceutical company, which engages in the development and commercialization of small molecule therapeutics for the treatment of obesity and metabolic diseases. Its product Bittera, is a first-in-class oral composition that selectively disrupts hunger signaling and regulates energy homeostasis. The company was incorporated in 2017 and is based in San Diego, California.

Blocko

Series B in 2018
Blocko is a commercial blockchain startup offering multinational organizations the ability to design, deploy, and manage digital services on a secure distributed network. It provides a blockchain operating system and a development platform with stable APIs. The company supports AERGO, a new open-source enterprise blockchain solution based on a hybrid blockchain design with advanced cloud deployment capabilities.

Chain Partners

Series A in 2018
Chain Partners, Inc. provides services based on block chain technology. The company develops Ethereum-based offline payments service Coinduck that allows users to make payments and wire transfers with Ethereum coins. The company was founded in 2017 and is based in Seoul, South Korea.

Innospark Inc.

Series A in 2013
Innospark Inc. develops mobile games. The company produces traffic-oriented network games that understand and center on social. It develops combat strategy and social dragon breeding games. Innospark Inc. was founded in 2012 and is based in Seoul, South Korea.

Tera Funding

Series A in 2018
Tera Funding is a real estate investment firm in Seoul, South Korea. Tera Funding is a real estate P2P financial company that offers an online platform for small investors to provide first-tier small and medium-sized construction loans to businesses.

Tutoring

Series A in 2019
Tutoring is an on-demand mLearning Platform.
BlackThorn Therapeutics operator of a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company intended to develop precision medicine for disorders of the central nervous system (CNS) based on advances in computational and clinical neuroscience. The company leverages a deep understanding of brain and behavior relationships that seeks to overcome historic challenges in drug discovery and development by targeting dysfunctional brain circuits. Its proprietary computational platform, the company seeks to identify novel targets, small molecule drug candidates and biologically-based patient subgroups most likely to respond to treatment.

Riiid

Series C in 2019
Riiid develop an AI Tutor platform with our exclusive machine learning technology. It was launched by SANTATOEIC, an AI Tutor service.

Superb AI

Series A in 2021
Superb AI is a Machine Learning data platform that creates, manipulates, and manages data without building custom tools. It uses proprietary deep learning AI that assists humans to achieve faster labeling of images and videos by splitting training data into smaller components. Superb AI was founded in 2018 and is headquartered in San Mateo, California.

Bespin Global

Series A in 2017
Bespin Global provide consulting, migration, managed service and solutions for hybrid cloud. They rapidly implement architectures optimized for various industry areas into a hybrid cloud environment interacting with IDB using AWS, MS Azure, and Flexcloud. Bespin Global is a premium brand for strengthening Hostway's cloud business that has provided corporate professional hosting services and managed services since 1998 and is dedicated to Hostway's cloud managed service provider (MSP) business.

Nohla Therapeutics

Series B in 2018
Nohla Therapeutics' singular passion is the development of best-in-class ex vivo expanded universal donor cellular therapies to transform the treatment of patients with cancer and other life threatening illnesses. Our products are manufactured and cryopreserved on an ongoing basis allowing for a bank of doses that are available for immediate (on demand) use. This is tremendously advantageous with regards to the ease and timing of treatment, the ability to provide repeated dosing for immune-oncology indications and reduction in patient risk and cost relative to other cell therapies.

B2Link

Venture Round in 2019
B2Link offers an online B2B beauty platform that offers subscription services for branded products. The platform also provides collaborative services that enable e-commerce companies to manage their business processes such as sourcing, product and inventory management, invoicing, delivery, communication, and more.

DancingAnchovy

Venture Round in 2013
DancingAnchovy is a Korean global game developer and publisher for mobile platforms established in 2011. It is composed of like-minded game designers and programmers. Team Monster is one of the latest games developed by DancingAnchovy. It is described as a revolutionary game where real-time action, role-playing, and social network game elements are seamlessly fused.