Lotte Accelerator Hosts 'L-Camp Online Demo Day' to Attract Startup Investments

Hwang Gak-gyu, CEO of Lotte Holdings, is delivering a congratulatory speech at the Lotte Accelerator online demo day on the 28th. (Photo by Lotte Holdings)

[Asia Economy Reporter Seungjin Lee] Lotte Accelerator announced on the 29th that it held the ‘L-Camp Online Demo Day’ on the 28th to help startups secure follow-up investments and facilitate business connections.

The demo day is an event where startups gather in one place after completing the accelerating program to introduce their businesses and share achievements with related parties such as venture capitalists.

Marking its 6th edition, this demo day was broadcast live online considering the difficulty of gathering a large number of people due to the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19). About 600 people, including Jang Byung-don, Vice President of KDB Industrial Bank, Kim Hong-il, Director of D.CAMP, and other prominent domestic and international investment institution officials, as well as executives related to new businesses of Lotte Group, attended both online and offline.

The event started with congratulatory remarks from Hwang Gak-gyu, CEO of Lotte Holdings and Chairman of the Board of Lotte Accelerator, and Lee Jin-sung, CEO of Lotte Accelerator, followed by presentations and Q&A sessions from the 6th batch of L-Camp startups.

Nine companies participated in the presentations, including QMIT, which developed a solution that analyzes athletes’ training and physical data to provide customized feedback; Lazy Society, which offers a subscription delivery service for men’s products; and ‘Seoul Unnideul,’ which operates Myanmar’s number one beauty content commerce based on Facebook.

L-Camp is Lotte Accelerator’s representative startup nurturing program that selects outstanding early-stage startups and provides comprehensive support such as startup grants, office space, and consulting. Since February 2016, Lotte Accelerator has supported 120 startups through L-Camp. Currently, 14 companies from the 7th batch are receiving support.

The achievements of startups from L-Camp are also noteworthy. According to an analysis of 72 startups from L-Camp batches 1 to 5 by Lotte Accelerator, their corporate value grew about fourfold from 174.8 billion KRW to 701 billion KRW. Direct employment more than doubled from 426 to 948 employees, and more than half of the companies secured follow-up investments.

Among the 6th batch of L-Camp, QMIT attracted follow-up investments totaling 1 billion KRW from Lotte Accelerator and Naver. Curate, which operates the non-face-to-face interview platform ‘Jikgam,’ held an online job fair with 120,000 job seekers in collaboration with the Korea Federation of Medium-sized Enterprises in May and received a follow-up investment of 300 million KRW from Danal in the same month.

Hwang Gak-gyu, CEO of Lotte Holdings and Chairman of the Board of Lotte Accelerator, said, “Recently, young consumers in their 20s and 30s are utilizing startup services in many parts of their daily lives such as food, clothing, and shelter, and this trend is expected to accelerate. Lotte Group will also make its best efforts to strengthen support for startups in line with these market changes and maintain close cooperative relationships to achieve mutual growth.”

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.