Invest1 publisher3 min readPublished
Wrtn hires Mirae Asset and NH to take its 1 trillion won August mark to public investors
The Korean AI service platform raised 100 billion won in August at a valuation above 1 trillion won, roughly 4.3 times all the money ever invested in it, and is targeting a preliminary review filing next year.
The Investor · Invest desk
What happened
- Wrtn Technologies said on the 23rd that it had selected Mirae Asset Securities as lead underwriter and NH Investment & Securities as co-underwriter for its initial public offering.
- The company is working out details with those underwriters and is targeting a filing for preliminary review next year.
- Korea has five AI startups valued above 1 trillion won, Wrtn alongside Rebellions, FuriosaAI, Galaxy Corporation and Upstage, and Wrtn is the only one in AI services.
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Why it matters
- decision The next price on Wrtn comes from a book, and the underwriters have roughly a year to decide what number that book can carry.
- constraint Appointing banks is the only step on the record, so a Korean AI services listing is still a schedule being coordinated.
- exposure With supplier list prices down 40% at Anthropic and halved at OpenAI, both Wrtn's cost of inference and its own subscription pricing are in motion while it prepares to file.
- precedent Whatever multiple Wrtn clears at becomes the first domestic reference point for pricing a Korean AI application company, because no other member of the 1 trillion won cohort is in that business.
The 100 billion won Series C that closed in August was about 43% of every won ever invested in Wrtn, whose cumulative investment stands at roughly 230 billion won [3][3]. At a mark above 1 trillion won, that round bought about a tenth of the company [2]. The other 130 billion won came in earlier [4].
Mirae Asset and NH now have to build a book for a company whose input prices are being cut in public [1]. Anthropic put out Claude Opus 5.5 on the 22nd, priced 40% below Opus 5, matching its top model Claude Fable 5.1 on most tasks and scoring higher on coding and knowledge-work benchmarks [5]. OpenAI shipped GPT-6 Sol and GPT-6 Luna the same day with API pricing at half the previous generation [6]. From October, according to The Information, Microsoft will discount Copilot by about 30% for customers buying more than 1,000 licences and by up to 50% above 10,000 [7].
Falling model prices land in two places for an AI service platform. They cut what inference costs, and they reset what a buyer expects a seat to cost; Sedaily's briefing describes companies shifting toward cost efficiency under the burden of AI budgets, with competition over value for money heating up [8]. Microsoft's discount is on its own corporate agent, so it moves the price of a seat; the cost of a token is untouched [7].
The queue behind Wrtn is thinner than the unicorn count suggests. Four of the five Korean AI companies valued above 1 trillion won sit outside AI services [4][5], so a book pricing Wrtn has no company of that size in the same business to work from. Wrtn has picked its banks and set a target of filing for preliminary review next year [1][2].
A valuation set by one round is a price paid by one set of buyers, and what decides whether it holds is whether Wrtn's own pricing stays put while its suppliers' falls. If subscription pricing holds while model list prices drop 40% at Anthropic and halve at OpenAI, the August mark was the cheap one [5][6]. If those cuts pass through to what Korean customers will pay for an AI service, 4.3 times money in was the optimistic case [1].
The same briefing carries the other route Korean AI took this month. LG AI Research signed a memorandum of understanding with the Kazakhstan government in mid-September to develop a Kazakh-language model with local companies and universities using Exaone [9], and it is pursuing an MOU next month with a Middle East sovereign wealth fund on Exaone Business Intelligence, a finance model that analyses some 8,000 listed companies [11]. The World Bank's 2026 World Development Report put English at 61.1% of Hugging Face training datasets by language this year, with Kazakh not registering in the statistics [10].
What to watch
- Whether the preliminary review filing lands next year, and on what revenue base.
- Whether Rebellions, FuriosaAI, Galaxy Corporation or Upstage appoints underwriters behind Wrtn.
- Whether Microsoft's October Copilot discount shows up in Korean enterprise seat pricing.