Kakao Mobility acquires Splyt

Kakao Mobility, the trucking subsidiary of South Korean messaging and Internet giant Kakao, has made its first acquisition in an attempt to increase its international presence. has acquired split, a London startup that works with travel, transport and finance apps to help them develop “super app” strategies by integrating other services.

Kakao Mobility has already worked with Splyt and wants to use this asset to further its global expansion plans in Southeast Asia and Europe. At the moment, Kakao Mobility offers limited services in about thirty markets outside of South Korea: the most recent were its launch in Guam last year and in Laos earlier this year.

"Splyt and Kakao Mobility's technology teams have been collaborating since 2019 to integrate and enable global ride-hailing services for Kakao T users through Splyt's ride-hailing API platform"said Splyt CTO Stephen Mason.

Financial terms of the deal have not been disclosed, but there are indications that it may not have been a super result for this super app enabler.

Splyt claims that its services are used by more than 2.000 billion people in 150 countries through clients such as Alipay, Uber, Binance, Grab, Trip.com, Booking.com, Kakao itself, and 70 more. But after a flurry of activity in recent years — including raising $33,5 million from SoftBank, Grab, AmEx and others, according to PitchBook data — Splyt stopped providing updates on its business in July 2022.

The acquisition will include technology and talent. Splyt has about 30 employees, who will join Kakao Mobility. Splyt's main executives will move to South Korea to continue managing and integrating the team at Kakao Mobility, according to a spokesperson for the latter company. (Kakao Mobility has about 950 employees.)

It is not yet clear how Kakao Mobility intends to use Splyt's technology: as leverage to work with a broader network of international partners or to expand its own app, Kakao T, which currently has some 32 million registered users.

Kakao Mobility itself is at a crossroads as a company: the company was originally spun off in part from Kakao Corporation in 2017, and remains 58% owned by it. But last year Kakao had to shelve the plans to sell part of that stake to a venture capital firm after protests by drivers and employees. Another IPO plan has also been postponed amid a cold market for tech stocks at the moment.

Carlyle, TPG, LG, and Google have invested more than $840 million in the mobility business. A report published last year in the Korea Economic Daily He points out that Kakao Mobility - which, in addition to car transport services, also offers parking search, navigation, bicycle rentals and has worked on autonomous driving - was valued at $6.500 billion.

The appearance of Splyt as a company speaks of a very particular moment in the market for on-demand services. Apps like Grab, Uber, Didi, Lyft, Ola and many others have collectively raised billions of dollars to compete with each other and build networks of workers and customers. However, intense competition across a narrow range of services made unit economics very difficult, so many of these companies focused on integrating more services into those applications to improve loyalty and increase customer spend, and thus the companies were born. called “super apps”. However, the complexity of integrating different services was a challenge in itself, and that's where Splyt stepped in, providing the technology to integrate the services and reconcile payments between the various parties.

This was enough to attract SoftBank as an investor. When it led a $19,5 million round into the startup in 2019, SoftBank was a big backer of a number of these on-demand businesses, and was also looking for its own entry point into the "super app" fray. », so the investment was seen as a way to help him on both fronts.

But fast forward to today, many of the companies running these apps, not to mention SoftBank itself, have struggled to grow and justify the investment exuberance of recent years. All of this may have spelled the split for Splyt, but perhaps also an opportunity for Kakao Mobility to pick up the pieces for their own purposes.

“We are going to create a new service that innovates the mobility experience of users around the world, incorporating the capabilities of the Kakao Mobility platform into the global supernetwork of applications that Split has built”, said Philipp Mintchin, CEO and co-founder of Splyt.

"We are delighted to welcome Splyt, which is [Kakao Mobility's] first overseas acquisition"Alex Ryu said in a statement. "Kakao Mobility will continue to scale our product and accelerate further global expansions through Splyt, which has unmatched global competitiveness in the mobility services platform space."