[IPO Spotlight] Bflysoft, News Platform Rozeus' 'Hidden Card'

Transfer Listing from KONEX to KOSDAQ
Demand Forecasting on 24-25th... General Subscription on 30-31st
Raised Funds to Be Used for R&D and Roseus Marketing Expenses

[Asia Economy Reporter Park Hyungsoo] Bflysoft, aiming to be the first news-specialized platform in Korea, is transferring its listing from the KONEX market to the KOSDAQ market. Utilizing the raised funds, the company plans to enhance its existing services and actively promote the 'Roseus' platform, which provides only the desired news from hundreds of thousands of news articles published daily.

According to the Financial Supervisory Service's electronic disclosure system on the 9th, Bflysoft will offer 1 million shares in the public offering, including 100,000 shares from existing shareholders, for the transfer listing. The desired public offering price range is 16,500 to 19,000 KRW per share, with a total offering amount between 16.5 billion and 19 billion KRW. IBK Investment & Securities is the lead underwriter.

Bflysoft is Korea's largest media big data service platform company. It holds AI big data analysis technology and legal media big data copyrights exceeding 30 billion cases.

The core AI technology, WIGO, is a co-evolutionary AI platform optimized for the HITL (human-in-the-loop) process, combining self-developed natural language processing AI with human intelligence. Based on vast media big data, the company is promoting various platform businesses. It is advancing engine technologies such as natural language processing (NLP), natural language understanding (NLU), and natural language generation (NLG) while providing services that users can easily access. It is expanding into various business areas by utilizing language AI and media big data.

Bflysoft offers services including 'iSurfer,' a news electronic scrap platform; 'Wigomon,' a media and big data analysis platform; and 'Roseus,' an AI-customized news media open platform. Roseus applies AI and big data technologies to hundreds of thousands of news articles released daily to provide only the news services desired by individuals. Six months after its launch, at the end of March, it surpassed 3.8 million monthly unique visitors.

Designed as an open platform, Roseus is easily accessible. It offers various services such as 'Newsroom,' where users can reproduce content in diverse ways, and the number of unique visitors is expected to increase further.

Bflysoft plans to use the funds raised through its initial public offering (IPO) to advance its services. More than half of the raised funds will be allocated to research and development and facility investments. Using core digitizing technology that automatically recognizes article layouts, the company will expand its service areas to include old documents, books, government records, and serial publications. The delivery methods will be diversified, including cloud-based services and ASP provision.

Marketing for the Roseus platform, expected to generate meaningful revenue from the second half of this year, will also be strengthened. Part of the raised funds will be used for marketing expenses to secure initial subscribers. Considering the estimated revenue and operating costs based on advertising rates per page view (PV) from major media platforms for subscribers and media platform operators, the Roseus business division is expected to turn profitable starting in 2024.

Legal risks related to copyright utilization remain a challenge. Since the early days of the iSurfer business, Bflysoft has been selected by the Korea Press Foundation under the Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism as an 'official news copyright distributor.' The company has paid copyright fees and conducted business using secondary data. In cases where this was not possible, the platform provided news platforms via outlink (direct link) methods that generate traffic to media company websites. In March of this year, some news media filed lawsuits claiming copyright infringement. Bflysoft has submitted a response for the first trial. Last month, 14 news media companies filed lawsuits with the same content as the BizWorldNews lawsuit. Related documents were delivered on the 2nd.

Due to the additional lawsuits, Bflysoft postponed the demand forecast date from the 9th to the 24th. The subscription period was also delayed to the 30th and 31st.

Since 2018, the company has recorded net losses, and its debt ratio has gradually increased. However, through two rights offerings last year, the debt ratio decreased compared to 2020. As of the end of last year, the debt ratio stood at 288.72%. Last year's sales consisted of 12.9 billion KRW from iSurfer, 2.4 billion KRW from service sales, and 1.3 billion KRW from other sales. iSurfer's clients include government agencies, government-affiliated organizations, large corporations, and public relations agencies.

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