[IPO Spotlight] Market Kurly to Hire 100 Developers... Company Value Up

[Asia Economy Reporter Park Soyeon] Market Kurly, preparing for an initial public offering (IPO), has hired a large number of developers. This is a preliminary step for platform optimization, logistics efficiency, and new business expansion.

According to the investment industry on the 27th, Market Kurly recently recruited over 100 experienced developers.

Last year, Kurly expanded its organizational size by hiring more than 100 developers, and this year it conducted an additional triple-digit open recruitment. Despite recruiting personnel with over two years of experience, it is reported that more than 400 developers and planners applied. Currently, additional negotiations regarding compensation are underway with about 100 final interview passers.

As of now, Kurly’s tech organization size is about 250 people, and with this recruitment, it will increase to approximately 350. The developers are responsible for software development and management, platform planning, data analysis, and design within Market Kurly.

The reason Kurly is focusing on securing tech talent ahead of its IPO is that platform advancement and logistics/delivery efficiency directly impact sales and profits beyond merely improving customer experience.

For example, Kurly maintains a product waste rate below 1%. This is significantly lower compared to the 2-3% product waste rate at general offline large supermarkets and 7-8% at convenience stores.

This is because predictive ordering technology, which forecasts products to be sold by considering orders, daily product sales, revenue, customer behavior data, purchase history, preferences, weather, and day of the week, is working efficiently.

Additionally, in logistics and delivery from production/harvest to customer consumption, machine learning is used to predict demand and manage deliveries.

The large-scale recruitment of developers is also related to new business expansion.

Kurly is preparing to expand its business into categories beyond food. For rapidly growing beauty products such as cosmetics, it plans to launch a separate online category from food within this year. It will also open a 'Kurly Section' on a Singapore e-commerce platform and start selling manufactured goods such as meal kits and wet wipes within the year.

Moreover, Kurly is promoting its own payment service, 'Kurly Pay,' and has plans to expand tech-based third-party delivery services as a new business.

With strong demand from overseas companies for logistics and service systems themselves, Kurly is also considering commercializing the logistics system itself as a service business.

An industry insider said, "While other distribution companies or platform operators focus on securing real estate such as logistics centers, Kurly is putting tremendous effort into expanding its developer workforce," adding, "The strategy is to leverage tech to widen the gap with competitors in platform and logistics management and increase corporate value."

Meanwhile, Kurly recorded sales of 428.9 billion KRW in 2019, 953.1 billion KRW in 2020, and 1.5614 trillion KRW in 2021. Compared to 2.9 billion KRW in sales in 2015, it has grown more than 500 times in seven years.

In July 2021, Kurly was recognized as a unicorn with a corporate value of 2.5 trillion KRW, and in December of the same year, it attracted a pre-IPO investment of 250 billion KRW from Anchor Equity, valuing the company at 4 trillion KRW.

The cumulative number of customers has exceeded 10 million, and as of April this year, the monthly active users (MAU) reached 3.4 million, an increase of 800,000 compared to a year ago.

Kurly filed for a preliminary review for listing on the Korea Exchange’s KOSPI market on March 28 and is awaiting the review results.