MangoPlate, Restaurant Discovery App, Secures $6.1 Million from Qualcomm, SoftBank Ventures Korea and Yahoo! JAPAN

SEOUL, South Korea, June 30, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- MangoPlate, a South Korean restaurant discovery service, closed an additional $6.1 million USD fund from Qualcomm Incorporated, through its venture investment group, Qualcomm Ventures, as well as SoftBank Ventures Korea and YJ Capital, a venture capital firm established by Yahoo! JAPAN.  MangoPlate is YJ Capital's first investment in a Korean company.

The additional funds bring MangoPlate's total funding to over $7.2 million USD investment so far in the aggregate. Investment in MangoPlate marks another major move by global investors and their drive to expand investments into Korea. With this investment, MangoPlate has gained a new title as the first Korean portfolio company of YJ Capital, the VC arm of Yahoo! JAPAN.

MangoPlate launched its service in October 2013 during SparkLabs', a startup accelerator in Korea, 2^nd Demo Day. MangoPlate helps people find restaurants through personalized restaurant recommendations. The service analyzes restaurant data, individual preferences and social networks to provide personal dining recommendations rather than a simple directory of restaurants. MangoPlate's platform allows users to provide reviews and photos about their dining experience, providing more transparent and reliable information than paid blog posts, which are prevalent in Korea.

James Kwon, Director of Qualcomm Ventures, said, "Food-tech is a new industry with great potential. With its investor base and funding to date, we believe MangoPlate is well positioned to become a new icon in Korea's food-tech industry."

Dae-woong Kim, Co-founder and Co-CEO of MangoPlate, said, "Our team is really excited about having Qualcomm Ventures, YJ Capital, and SoftBank Ventures Korea as our investors for this investment.  Beyond capital, these investors will help us execute on our vision to dominate the Korean market and beyond. This additional funding will allow us to focus more on customer acquisition, feature enhancement and POI expansion throughout the country."

MangoPlate

MangoPlate was established on April 1^st in 2013 and launched its restaurant discovery service on October 1^st in 2013. The service was created to help people find great places to eat nearby. The key difference between MangoPlate and other similar services is that MangoPlate provides customized restaurant recommendations rather than a simple restaurant directory. Additionally, most of the content within the app such as restaurant reviews and pictures are crowd-sourced from real users. MangoPlate has grown tenfold in the number of total users and is continuously increasing in the number of downloads. Thus far, MangoPlate has received funding from SparkLabs Global, TIPS and SoftBank Ventures Korea in 2014 and received additionally funding from Qualcomm Ventures, YJ Capital and SoftBank Ventures Korea in 2015. 

iOS     : https://itunes.apple.com/app/id628509224

Android : https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mangoplatehttps://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mangoplate

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MangoPlate Monica Shim
Contact: +82 10-5105-3696
E-mail: [email protected]

SOURCE MangoPlate