This Year, '50 Baby Unicorn Companies and 15 Prospective Unicorn Companies' Selected

Up to 300 Million KRW Market Development Fund for Baby Unicorns
Special Guarantee up to 20 Billion KRW per Company for Pre-Unicorns

The Ministry of SMEs and Startups announced on the 26th that it has finalized the selection of 50 "Baby Unicorn" companies and 15 "Pre-Unicorn" companies with high potential to grow into global unicorns.

Since the launch of the Global Unicorn Project in 2019, a total of 250 Baby Unicorn companies and 111 Pre-Unicorn companies have been selected. In this round of recruitment, 199 companies applied for the Baby Unicorn nurturing program, and 107 companies applied for the Pre-Unicorn special guarantee, showing competition ratios of approximately 4:1 and 7:1, respectively.

The average investment attracted by the Baby Unicorn companies selected this year was 6.04 billion KRW, and the average sales revenue was 3.55 billion KRW. For Pre-Unicorn companies, the average investment attracted was 38 billion KRW, and the average sales revenue was 20.9 billion KRW.

Selected Baby Unicorn companies will receive up to 300 million KRW in market pioneering funds. Notably, this year, a special guarantee (up to 5 billion KRW) from the Korea Technology Finance Corporation was newly established to help Baby Unicorn companies secure growth capital smoothly.

Pre-Unicorn companies will be granted a special guarantee of up to 20 billion KRW per company. To accelerate global expansion, companies ranking in the top 30% with excellent scores in the final evaluation will receive an additional 30% increase in their guarantee limit.

Additionally, non-financial support will be strengthened by matching companies with private specialized consulting firms for tailored growth support and by supporting investor relations (IR) sessions targeting domestic and international venture capitalists.

Among the Baby Unicorn companies, "Friendlier AI," which achieved excellent results in the final evaluation, provides a customized language model training platform service that enables general companies to use generative artificial intelligence (AI) at low cost. Among the Pre-Unicorn companies, "Dot," which possesses tactile display technology that converts graphic information into Braille, received outstanding evaluations.

Oh Young-joo, Minister of SMEs and Startups, stated, "Despite difficult economic conditions, the Global Unicorn Project's achievements continue to expand, with many Baby and Pre-Unicorn companies successfully going public (IPO) and becoming unicorns. We will continue to steadily expand policy support to nurture global unicorns that lead the world market."

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