Kakao Mobility
Funding History
| TPG/NPS consortium & Carlyle follow-on · 06/2021 | $3.2B |
|---|---|
| Strategic investment · 12/2021 | $4.2B |
About
Kakao Mobility operates Kakao T, South Korea's leading mobility app, offering taxi-hailing, designated-driver dispatch, parking, bike access, and navigation services.
- headquarters
- Pangyo, Seongnam, Gyeonggi Province, South Korea
- founded
- 2017 (spun off from Kakao Corp.)
- sector
- Mobility / ride-hailing technology
- koreaMarketShare
- ~90% of South Korea's ride-hailing market as of 2025
- totalDisclosedFunding
- ~$938.9M across primary rounds, 2017–2021
Overview
Kakao Mobility Corp. is a Seoul-area mobility technology company, headquartered in Pangyo (Seongnam, Gyeonggi Province), South Korea, that operates Kakao T, the country's leading taxi-hailing and mobility-services app.
The company was spun off from parent Kakao Corp. as an independent entity in 2017, backed by a TPG-led investor consortium, and has since expanded Kakao T into designated-driver dispatch, parking, bike and scooter access, navigation, and, more recently, autonomous-driving and delivery-robot pilots.
Kakao Corp. remains Kakao Mobility's controlling shareholder, holding a majority stake, alongside financial investors including TPG, The Carlyle Group, LG Corp., and Alphabet's Google, which came in during a series of 2021 investment rounds.
As of 2026, Kakao Mobility is pursuing a roughly $1 billion American depositary receipt listing in the United States via a confidential draft SEC registration, a move industry sources say is aimed primarily at giving the TPG-led consortium an exit rather than raising new capital for the company.
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