HyperConnect (CEO Ahn Sang-il), a domestic venture company that operates Azar, a video chat messenger, will be sold to US Match Group, which operates the world’s largest dating app, Tinder. The sale amount was $1.725 billion (about 1.93 trillion won). The sale of more than 1 trillion won in the domestic startup industry is the first example after elegant brothers were sold to delivery heroes in Germany (4.75 trillion won) in 2019.
HyperConnect announced on the 10th that it has decided to sell 100% of its stake to Match Group. Established in 2014, HyperConnect is a native venture company that provides dating and video chat apps such as Hakunara Eve and Hakunara Eve in more than 210 countries around the world. Hazard (Spanish for good luck) is gaining explosive popularity, ranking first in communication app downloads (by Google Play) in 10 countries including Europe, Middle East and India.
The Match Group is known to have appreciated HyperConnect’s robust technology such as global scalability and large-scale simultaneous access processing capability. An official from HyperConnect said, “We plan to expand the service to North America based on the Matchgroup network and marketing.” Existing personnel, including CEO Ahn Sang-il and Yong Hyun-taek, chief technology officer (CTO), are responsible for HyperConnect management and global market strategy. Major shareholders, such as CEO Ahn and CTO Yong, and some investors, such as Altos Ventures and Softbank Ventures, wrote another’big success myth’.
Sold 100% stake to US Match Group… Sang-il Ahn, CEO of HyperConnect
Ahn Sang-il, 40, who sold the video messenger’Azar’ for 2 trillion won, is one of the leading’serial entrepreneurs’. There is a criticism that he is a rare venture entrepreneur in that he wrote a success story over repeated failures. Now, with assets of at least hundreds of billions of billions of dollars, it has peaked as the protagonist of another jackpot myth.
○Preparing for start-ups from college entrance
Ahn, who entered the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Seoul National University in 2000, has developed a dream of entrepreneurship since his first year. I entered the Seoul National University Student Venture Network, which is an on-campus venture club, and prepared a business by meeting successful seniors. He also sold Kimbap to raise university tuition and living expenses.
CEO Ahn started his first business in 2002. It was a company dealing with consulting work in the information technology (IT) field. However, at the time, it made a bold investment in an IT solution company and suffered a huge loss. It was the beginning of hardships from the beginning. He tried to start a business again in 2007 while earning pocket money through part-time restaurant jobs and IT consulting. It is an Internet search company called LeviSearch. A technology called’reliability estimation algorithm’ was used. It is a technology that collects individual reputations, minimizes deviations, and displays them as numbers. It also made plans to use Levisearch’s search technology in the entire system of Seoul National University, and to start commercial services in the United States before Korea by establishing a corporation in San Francisco, USA. It even received investment while attracting industry attention.
However, it was hit directly by the 2008 global financial crisis. Investment was cut off and the product didn’t come out properly. All of the fortunes were robbed and the last salary of the 30 employees and the company’s outstanding payments were resolved. There was also a debt of 800 million won. Still, I got up again. He waited for an opportunity to re-challenge while running an online community company and a photo studio.
In 2013, he founded HyperConnect with former director Jung Kang-sik, a younger student at the university, and Yong Hyun-taek, a younger brother of a military service company. At this time,’Azar’ was made. Hazard has exploded its potential by attracting 10 million users in a year or so and 100 million users in three years. It is known that the company’s stake held by the three founding members is more than 60%. It is estimated that they made up more than 1.2 trillion won in this sale. In particular, some employees can exercise up to 340 times more stock options (stock options). HyperConnect has given its employees a total of 1,726,500 stock options seven times since 2015. The stock option strike price ranges from KRW 500 to KRW 398,000. It is worth about 140 billion won. HyperConnect is estimated to have sold its shares to Match Group at around 170,000 won per share.
○The myth of success that has been strengthened from repeated failures
The senior entrepreneur who supported Ahn’s challenge is Jang Byung-gyu, Chairman of the Kraftton Board of Directors. Chairman Jang is also a representative serial entrepreneur in Korea. Representative Ahn is known to have used Chairman Jang as a role model since he was in school. He also founded Levisearch, hoping to build a company that goes beyond the technology of first sight, an internet search company founded by Chairman Jang in 2005. Representative Ahn also received direct help from Chairman Chang. Representative Ahn got acquainted with Chairman Chang at Neowiz, an internet company who worked for military service special cases. Chairman Jang, a founding member of Neowiz, served as a director at the time. Chairman Jang provided funding for the project so that President Ahn, who was in trouble due to the closure of Levisearch, could recover.
CEO Ahn said that past business failures became the soil for success. A typical example is’I will not do service without a profit model.’ Until now, startup items had a high probability of success, but they did not last long because they could not make money. On the other hand, Hazard has generated billions of billions in sales from the first year of its launch. He also said that he felt keenly about the fact that’even though the vision is good, it is useless if the product cannot be released’,’services should do what consumers like.’
The growth of HyperConnect has led to technological innovation. Advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) applied image and video analysis were quickly utilized in Hazard. Its own speech recognition and image analysis technology developed by HyperConnect has been recognized by the world’s most prestigious AI conferences such as’Interspeech’ and’International Society for Computer Vision’ (CVPR).
Reporters Juwan Kim/Minki Gu/Junghwan Hwang [email protected]