JEJU-DO < invest Korea

MYSC has the largest talent pool among Korean accelerators

ESG management is an essential part of business management, which creates financial values to raise the social values of a business and build sustainability. We met Park Jeong-eun, the head of the Jeju Office of MYSC Inc.(Merry Year Social Company), an impact investor aiming to address social problems through innovation and build a healthy earth ecosystem.

Q. Would you introduce MYSC?

▶ MYSC is a consultancy for social innovation, an accelerator to discover and incubate a social venture, which deals with social issues for business, and impact investor helping businesses enjoy sustainable growth. MYSC, founded in 2011, opened the Jeju Office as part of the social venture business incubation project led by the Jeju Free International City Development Center. At present, the Office runs the 2nd wave of “Route330 ICT” with education and investments, through which ICT service providers equipped with promising engineering technologies are supported to disseminate social values with their businesses.

Q. What makes you run an accelerating company(AC) based in Jeju?

▶ MYSC has the largest talent pool as an AC in Korea, providing services including consulting, accelerating, and impact investments to innovators to take a sustainable direction. Our accelerating service covers various sectors like tourism, ocean and fisheries, culture and art, agriculture and foods, and sports transcending regional and national boundaries. Jeju is special to us across all the sectors our AC business covers. We aspire to become a control tower to help innovators who try to build a sustainable Jeju and link the private and the public to bring sustainability into a reality.

Q. What is the Route330 ICT?

▶ It is a program to discover Jeju-specific unicorn candidates under the slogan of “The Road to Innovation Found in Jeju.” We look for startups and support them with our accelerating activities for training and investment attractions to combine promising technologies with Jeju’s major business themes, contribute to Jeju and its people in terms of environment and employment, and move beyond the regional boundaries to create an impact at home and abroad.
To be specific, we set forth the ESG management paradigm, where the eight ICT technologies and the ten Jeju industrial themes are combined into values for the environment and employment in general, return those benefits to the local communities, and support the players to create a new market. To this end, we make available project funding (up to KRW10million), one-to-one coaching sessions, the IR and demo-day events, and JDC cooperative project-aligned supports, and offer training curricula for capacity-building to define problems, find solutions, and have them verified in the market

*8 ICT technologies : data, 5G, online contact (ONTACT), single-person economy(Honconomy), content, digital spending, digital twin, and AI.
**10 industrial themes: mobility, energy, finance, logistics, healthcare, education, agriculture and fisheries, food processing, tourism, beauty

Boot Camp (L) for tenants’ networking, Training and consulting for startups (R)

Q. What kinds of companies did you discover?

▶ As you know, the plastics issue cannot be fully resolved with the current system and solutions. There is a social venture called Marine Innovation that does business to replace plastics with marine algae, and we made an impact investment into the company. Having been recognized for its corporate values and moving smoothly with a stream of innovations, Marine Innovation received the “Climate Change Grand Leaders Award” in 2021, which was awarded to active responders to climate change.
And there is YOU NEED CHARACTER, a character creator and animation producer, founded in 2017 by a former executive of ICONIX, the famous “Pororo the Little Penguin” creator. The company aggressively moved into global markets early on and has been trying to build global competitiveness with its intellectual property rights. Their main projects include Cricket Pang targeting the Indian market and the BongBong Guardian animation.
The Route330 members, including Star-Pickers, Bluewhale Company, DRONG ORANGE and etc., won 1st prizes in the BM section, which evaluates social value creation with the ESG-based business models. It was an achievement resulting from our impact investment.

Q. What is unique about MYSC compared to other accelerators?

▶ First, it is fair to say that our investment execution process is startup-friendly. This is well appreciated especially when a startup receives the very first investment. MYSC knows that a company representative experiences the most difficulties when receiving the first round of investment. Noticing those difficulties and considering their pain points that have been found through the interviews, MYSC designed an investment execution process from the perspective of a startup, resulting in a kinder investment process for entrepreneurs, we believe, than that of other investors. Secondly, post-investment care is provided continuously. On top of regular post-investment meetings held to promote the growth of invested companies, MYSC links them with our resources. Unlike other investors, MYSC provides services like accelerating, consulting for large companies, and education and training on top of investing in startups so that a range of networking opportunities and resources are also serviceable. As a result, we are able to meet different requirements and conditions of our clients.

Route330 (top), coworking-space (bottom)

Q. What is the vision of MYSC?

▶ MYSC is interested in businesses that produce both financial and social outcomes. Putting a priority on sustainability over growth, we will continue to pay particular attention to companies contributing to society in terms of senior citizens, the disabled, women with interrupted careers, and North Korean defectors. Starting a business is a process of solving an unknown problem, and the company should serve as the leader of navigation to find a solution along with colleagues, customers, and society. On this journey, MYSC aspires to become more than a trusted partner, while supporting startups to create more significant impacts in larger markets and stretch further and further.