Capstone Partners is showing strong performance. The news that OpenAI is launching the GPT Store appears to be influencing the stock price. The GPT Store is a platform unveiled at OpenAI's first developer conference last November. Similar to Apple App Store and Google Play, each user can create and sell a ChatGPT-based ‘customized GPT.’ For example, creators can make a ‘Cooking Specialist GPT’ or a ‘Math Education GPT,’ earning revenue while OpenAI takes a commission.
Capstone Partners invested in the AI industry even before ChatGPT gained attention. It already holds a substantial AI portfolio, ranging from generative AI (Gen AI) to AI healthcare, AI solutions and platforms, and smart factories. Many companies invested in by Capstone Partners have been selected among Korea AI Startup 100. Capstone Partners began actively investing in Gen AI startups from 2020. The startups invested in at that time include Lytton Technologies (Lytton), FriendlyAI, and DeepX. All three companies received early-stage investments from Capstone Partners.
As of 10:40 AM on the 5th, Capstone Partners was trading at 6,700 KRW, up 840 KRW (14.33%) compared to the previous trading day.
Recently, Lytton’s growth speed has been attracting attention in the AI industry. Lytton reached 2 million cumulative service subscribers during last year’s Christmas holiday. This milestone was achieved about 11 months after the official service launch in January. The monthly active users (MAU) were also recorded at 1.55 million.
The Lytton app ranked first overall and first in the lifestyle category on the Apple App Store from December 23 to 25 last month. It also secured the number one spot in the lifestyle category on the Google Play Store starting from the Christmas holiday.
The reasons behind Lytton’s popularity are analyzed to be ▲ AI character chatbots that allow conversations with various personas such as Santa Claus, psychological counselors, and foreign friends ▲ AI profile pictures with different concepts delivered daily, tailored for the 10-20 age group, among other new services.
CEO Se-young Lee stated at a press briefing last month, "Lytton is growing slightly faster than Toss and at a similar pace to KakaoTalk. Since March last year, it has consistently grown by more than 10% weekly on average. It has achieved 35-fold growth over nine months."
He added, "Our goal is 5 million MAU in the first half of the year," emphasizing, "We are beginning the journey toward becoming a full-fledged mega (large-scale) platform."
Lytton will intensify its push into the Japanese market next year. Last month, Lytton established a local subsidiary in Japan, where the local MAU has surpassed 30,000. Lytton plans to expand its overseas presence to the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and other regions.
Lytton offers major large language models (LLMs) such as OpenAI’s 'GPT-4', ‘GPT-4 Turbo’, and Google’s 'PaLM 2' for free. It also introduced 'Lytton Studio,' which allows anyone to easily create AI tools. Lytton cites 'LLM Integrated Control' (MoM, Model of Models) and 'Retrieval-Augmented Generation' (RAG) as its core technologies.
Lytton recently completed its Series A investment round, raising approximately 19 billion KRW. Mashup Angels made the initial (seed) investment in 2021, and in November 2022, Suijeneris Partners, Capstone Partners, Industrial Bank of Korea, N Partners, and Korea Credit Guarantee Fund conducted a pre-Series A investment. In June last year, Lytton secured a 15 billion KRW Series A investment. Capstone Partners, an existing investor, led the round, with new investors including KDB Industrial Bank, Z Venture Capital, Woori Venture Partners, Hana Bank, Hana Securities, and KB Securities participating.
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