THE KOREA ECONOMIC DAILY, GLOBAL EDITION

With a number of high-profile US startups in line for initial public offerings, investors in South Korean startups may be looking to Wall Street for color on their own valuations.

Snowflake Inc., a US-based software developer, and Palantir Technologies, a US data analytics company, filed for IPOs last week. Home-sharing platform Airbnb also submitted an IPO application this month, as liquidity-driven stock markets are bouncing back from March lows.

In South Korea, games developer Krafton Inc., 13.2% owned by Tencent Holdings' investment arm, is preparing for an IPO. The startup, behind hit game titles PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (PUBG) and TERA, is poised to become the country’s first unicorn, or a startup valued over $1 billion, to go public.

According to CB Insights, a research company, 10 South Korean companies have achieved unicorn status as of August this year. Online platform operators make up the bulk of them.

Most of them have hardly made any profit yet. But their valuations were marked up by foreign venture capital firms, including Japan’s SoftBank and US-based Sequoia Capital.