Sources: South Korea's largest travel booking app Yanolja is in talks for a dual IPO listing in Seoul and overseas, aiming for a $4B+
Sohee Kim / Bloomberg :
Context & Ripple Effects
In March 2021, Yanolja's reported dual-listing talks targeted a $4B+ valuation just as Seoul was absorbing a wave of large domestic tech listings — Kakao Pay seeking up to ~$1.4B that July, car-sharing startup Socar filing for an August 2022 IPO soon after. The travel app then raised about $1.7B from SoftBank's Vision Fund 2 at a $9B+ valuation, more than double the figure in the IPO talks.
With fresh capital, Yanolja bought a 70% stake in Interpark for about $250M, pulling a publicly listed e-commerce operator under its umbrella ahead of any flotation. Rival Myrealtrip is now targeting its own Seoul IPO at a $1B+ valuation as early as H2 2027, confirming the domestic-listing path this story opened.
First-order effects
- A successful dual listing would hand Yanolja both Korean retail liquidity and overseas institutional access simultaneously, letting it fund the Interpark integration without another private round.
- SoftBank's Vision Fund 2 gains a public-market exit route for what became a $9B+ position, roughly double the valuation discussed in these IPO talks.
Second-order effects
- Myrealtrip's planned Seoul IPO at a $1B+ target follows the template Yanolja validated: Korean online-travel players no longer need US exchanges to reach unicorn-scale valuations.
Third-order effects
- If Yanolja lists on both venues, Korean consumer platforms may increasingly pair domestic primary listings with overseas secondary ones, keeping control and brand at home while widening the investor base — a structural alternative to the traditional Silicon Valley-to-Nasdaq path.
The trend: South Korea's consumer internet champions are choosing Seoul-centered IPOs backed by global funds like SoftBank, turning the domestic exchange into the default venue for local unicorns rather than a stepping stone to Wall Street.