Transportation

Kakao Mobility picks up ‘super app’ startup Splyt, once backed by SoftBank and Grab

Comment

taxi/ridesharing depicted with illustration of yellow and black cars
Image Credits: Bryce Durbin / TechCrunch

Kakao Mobility, the ride-hailing subsidiary of South Korean messaging and internet giant Kakao, has made its first acquisition as it looks to raise its international profile. It has acquired Splyt, a startup out of London that works with apps in areas like travel, ride-hailing and finance to help them build out “super app” strategies by integrating other services.

Kakao Mobility has already worked with Splyt, and it wants to use the asset to spur global expansion plans across Southeast Asia and Europe. Kakao Mobility currently offers limited services in about 30 markets outside of South Korea: most recently, it launched in Guam last year and 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,” CTO of Splyt Stephen Mason told TechCrunch. 

Splyt wants to connect the world’s ride-hailing apps for easy international roaming

Financial terms of the deal are not being disclosed, but there are some signs that it may not have been a super outcome for this super app enabler.

Splyt says its services are used by more than 2 billion people in 150 countries by way of customers like Alipay, Uber, Binance, Grab, Trip.com, Booking.com, Kakao itself and 70 others. But after a flurry of activity over the last several years — including raising $33.5 million from SoftBank, Grab, AmEx and others, per PitchBook data — Splyt stopped providing updates about its business in July 2022.  

The acquisition will include technology and talent. Splyt has around 30 staff, and they will join Kakao Mobility. Key management at Splyt will move to South Korea to continue to manage and integrate the team into Kakao Mobility, a spokesperson for the latter company said. (Kakao Mobility has about 950 employees.)

It’s not yet clear how Kakao Mobility intends to use Splyt’s tech: using it as a lever to work with a wider network of international partners or using it to extend Kakao Mobility’s own app, Kakao T, which currently has around 32 million registered users.

Kakao Mobility itself is at a crossroads as a business: The company was originally partly spun out of Kakao Corporation in 2017, and it is still 58% owned by it. But last year Kakao had to shelve plans to sell part of that stake to a PE firm after pushback from drivers and employees. A further plan for an IPO has also been put on hold amid a cool market for tech stocks at the moment.

Other investors in the mobility business have included Carlyle, TPG, LG and Google, which have poured more than $840 million into it. A report last year in Korea Economic Daily notes that Kakao Mobility — which, in addition to ride-hailing also offers parking space searches, navigation, bike rental and has worked on autonomous driving — was valued at $6.5 billion. 

Splyt’s emergence as a business speaks to a very particular time in the on-demand services market. Apps like Grab, Uber, Didi, Lyft, Ola and many others collectively raised billions of dollars to compete against each other and build out networks of gig workers and customers. Intense competition on a narrow range of services, however, made for very challenging unit economics, so a lot of these companies focused on folding in more services into those apps to improve loyalty and increase customer spend — and thus the so-called “super app” was born. The complexity of integrating different services was a challenge in itself, however, and that was where Splyt stepped in, providing the tech behind the scenes to integrate services and reconcile payments between various parties.

That in itself was enough to bring on SoftBank as an investor. When it led a $19.5 million round in the startup in 2019, SoftBank was a big backer of a number of these on-demand businesses, and it was also in search of its own entry point into the “super app” fray, and so the investment was seen as a way to help it on both of those fronts.

But fast-forward to today, and a lot of the companies running these apps, not to mention SoftBank itself, have been struggling to grow and justify their investment exuberance of past years. All of that may have spelled splitsville for Splyt, but perhaps an opportunity too for Kakao Mobility to pick up the pieces for its own ends.

“We will create a new service that innovates the mobility experience of users around the world by incorporating Kakao Mobility’s platform capabilities into the global super app network that Split has built,” CEO and co-founder of Splyt Philipp Mintchin said.

“We’re thrilled to welcome Splyt, which is the first overseas acquisition [of Kakao Mobility],” said Alex Ryu in a statement. “Kakao Mobility will continue to scale our product and accelerate further global expansions through Splyt, which has unrivaled global competitiveness in the mobility service platform space.”

More TechCrunch

U.K.-based Seraphim Space is spinning up its 13th accelerator program, with nine participating companies working on a range of tech from propulsion to in-space manufacturing and space situational awareness. The…

Seraphim’s latest space accelerator welcomes nine companies

OpenAI has reached a deal with Reddit to use the social news site’s data for training AI models. In a blog post on OpenAI’s press relations site, the company said…

OpenAI inks deal to train AI on Reddit data

X users will now be able to discover posts from new Communities that are trending directly from an Explore tab within the section.

X pushes more users to Communities

For Mark Zuckerberg’s 40th birthday, his wife got him a photoshoot. Zuckerberg gives the camera a sly smile as he sits amid a carefully crafted re-creation of his childhood bedroom.…

Mark Zuckerberg’s makeover: Midlife crisis or carefully crafted rebrand?

Strava announced a slew of features, including AI to weed out leaderboard cheats, a new ‘family’ subscription plan, dark mode and more.

Strava taps AI to weed out leaderboard cheats, unveils ‘family’ plan, dark mode and more

We all fall down sometimes. Astronauts are no exception. You need to be in peak physical condition for space travel, but bulky space suits and lower gravity levels can be…

Astronauts fall over. Robotic limbs can help them back up.

Microsoft will launch its custom Cobalt 100 chips to customers as a public preview at its Build conference next week, TechCrunch has learned. In an analyst briefing ahead of Build,…

Microsoft’s custom Cobalt chips will come to Azure next week

What a wild week for transportation news! It was a smorgasbord of news that seemed to touch every sector and theme in transportation.

Tesla keeps cutting jobs and the feds probe Waymo

Sony Music Group has sent letters to more than 700 tech companies and music streaming services to warn them not to use its music to train AI without explicit permission.…

Sony Music warns tech companies over ‘unauthorized’ use of its content to train AI

Winston Chi, Butter’s founder and CEO, told TechCrunch that “most parties, including our investors and us, are making money” from the exit.

GrubMarket buys Butter to give its food distribution tech an AI boost

The investor lawsuit is related to Bolt securing a $30 million personal loan to Ryan Breslow, which was later defaulted on.

Bolt founder Ryan Breslow wants to settle an investor lawsuit by returning $37 million worth of shares

Meta, the parent company of Facebook, launched an enterprise version of the prominent social network in 2015. It always seemed like a stretch for a company built on a consumer…

With the end of Workplace, it’s fair to wonder if Meta was ever serious about the enterprise

X, formerly Twitter, turned TweetDeck into X Pro and pushed it behind a paywall. But there is a new column-based social media tool in town, and it’s from Instagram Threads.…

Meta Threads is testing pinned columns on the web, similar to the old TweetDeck

As part of 2024’s Accessibility Awareness Day, Google is showing off some updates to Android that should be useful to folks with mobility or vision impairments. Project Gameface allows gamers…

Google expands hands-free and eyes-free interfaces on Android

A hacker listed the data allegedly breached from Samco on a known cybercrime forum.

Hacker claims theft of India’s Samco account data

A top European privacy watchdog is investigating following the recent breaches of Dell customers’ personal information, TechCrunch has learned.  Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC) deputy commissioner Graham Doyle confirmed to…

Ireland privacy watchdog confirms Dell data breach investigation

Ampere and Qualcomm aren’t the most obvious of partners. Both, after all, offer Arm-based chips for running data center servers (though Qualcomm’s largest market remains mobile). But as the two…

Ampere teams up with Qualcomm to launch an Arm-based AI server

At Google’s I/O developer conference, the company made its case to developers — and to some extent, consumers — why its bets on AI are ahead of rivals. At the…

Google I/O was an AI evolution, not a revolution

TechCrunch Disrupt has always been the ultimate convergence point for all things startup and tech. In the bustling world of innovation, it serves as the “big top” tent, where entrepreneurs,…

Meet the Magnificent Six: A tour of the stages at Disrupt 2024

There’s apparently a lot of demand for an on-demand handyperson. Khosla Ventures and Pear VC have just tripled down on their investment in Honey Homes, which offers up a dedicated…

Khosla Ventures, Pear VC triple down on Honey Homes, a smart way to hire a handyman

TikTok is testing the ability for users to upload 60-minute videos, the company confirmed to TechCrunch on Thursday. The feature is available to a limited group of users in select…

TikTok tests 60-minute video uploads as it continues to take on YouTube

Flock Safety is a multibillion-dollar startup that’s got eyes everywhere. As of Wednesday, with the company’s new Solar Condor cameras, those eyes are solar-powered and use wireless 5G networks to…

Flock Safety’s solar-powered cameras could make surveillance more widespread

Since he was very young, Bar Mor knew that he would inevitably do something with real estate. His family was involved in all types of real estate projects, from ground-up…

Agora raises $34M Series B to keep building the Carta for real estate

Poshmark, the social commerce site that lets people buy and sell new and used items to each other, launched a paid marketing tool on Thursday, giving sellers the ability to…

Poshmark’s ‘Promoted Closet’ tool lets sellers boost all their listings at once

Google is launching a Gemini add-on for educational institutes through Google Workspace.

Google adds Gemini to its Education suite

More money for the generative AI boom: Y Combinator-backed developer infrastructure startup Recall.ai announced Thursday it has raised a $10 million Series A funding round, bringing its total raised to over…

YC-backed Recall.ai gets $10M Series A to help companies use virtual meeting data

Engineers Adam Keating and Jeremy Andrews were tired of using spreadsheets and screenshots to collab with teammates — so they launched a startup, CoLab, to build a better way. The…

CoLab’s collaborative tools for engineers line up $21M in new funding

Reddit announced on Wednesday that it is reintroducing its awards system after shutting down the program last year. The company said that most of the mechanisms related to awards will…

Reddit reintroduces its awards system

Sigma Computing, a startup building a range of data analytics and business intelligence tools, has raised $200 million in a fresh VC round.

Sigma is building a suite of collaborative data analytics tools

European Union enforcers of the bloc’s online governance regime, the Digital Services Act (DSA), said Thursday they’re closely monitoring disinformation campaigns on the Elon Musk-owned social network X (formerly Twitter)…

EU ‘closely’ monitoring X in wake of Fico shooting as DSA disinfo probe rumbles on