CONTINUING with its ambition to be “number one travel company in the world” and to grow Yanolja from unicorn to decacorn, Yanolja Cloud has acquired South Korea-based ad tech company Dable to strengthen its AI technology in the global market.
Dable, started in 2015 in Seoul by four entrepreneurs from RecoPick of SK planet, is a global adtech company described on its website as “a content discovery platform, which aims to connect users, media and content”. In 2021, it was ranked 46th place out of the top 500 companies listed on the Financial Times Asia-Pacific High-Growth Companies.
The company says it collects and analyses real-time website log data of 500 million users per month, using machine-learning technology, and claims to have partnerships with over 3,000 clients such as media corporations, commerce corporations, and content providers (applications and blogs), providing them with personalisation services.
Prior to acquisition, Dable had also been aggressively expanding into other Asian markets, including Taiwan, Indonesia, Japan, Vietnam and Malaysia.
In its press release, Yanolja Cloud said Dable operates more than 40% of sales from the global market. “Based on AI, data, and global business, Dable conducts the business with the goal of becoming the next unicorn company, recording an average annual growth rate of more than 108%”.
“Dable is well-evaluated in the global market when it comes to its technology with the user-customized content recommendation service and native ad platform based on AI including big data, NLP (Natural Language Processing), and deep learning.
“This year, it is accelerating its global expansion by achieving the number one position in the industry of ‘personalized content recommendation service’ and native ad in Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam, and Indonesia, etc.”
Yanolja Cloud said that as a SaaS company offering software for various spaces, it decided to acquire Dable for the synergy to combine Dable’s AI technology and the solution-based global big data business of Yanolja Cloud.
It plans to strengthen its position as an AI-based global SaaS company through the digitalisation of spaces, global distribution of digitalised information, and expansion of data business.
In particular, it plans to introduce more automated hotel solutions by combining AI and blockchain with cloud and IoT, the core technologies of global hotel solutions. Through NLP and deep learning, it is expected to analyse customer behavior data in the app and provide customized recommendation services.
In addition, Yanolja Cloud plans to optimise DSP (Demand-side Platform) for the industry built for the spaces including travel and hospitality, leisure, and residence so that it can recommend relevant content for consumers through various digital channels.
Through the platform, the companies will be able to significantly improve advertising efficiency. As AI leaders, Yanolja Cloud and Dable are expected to lead the advancement of industry-customized digital marketing and automation of operations throughout the industry.
“We will innovate and lead the market with the space-specific deep learning-based DSP with Yanolja Cloud, the global SaaS company,” said Chaehyun Lee, CEO of Dable. “Dable will grow its competitiveness in the global market by proactively recruiting talents and expanding our global business.”
On the Dable website, Lee related his inspiration to start Dable. “I became interested in starting my own venture during my NASA internship. It was a privilege to work with universal researchers, however I realised that it would take at least 10 years for the technology that I was researching on to bring positive impacts on most lives. So I shifted my career from researching in a lab to working at a corporate with the hope of developing technology that can impact people’s lives instantly.”
He developed the first ever product recommendation platform in South Korea that can be applied to online shopping malls while working as the head of the RecoPick team at SK Planet in 2011.
“With this opportunity, Yanolja Cloud is able to secure the core capability for the global data platform establishment with differentiated technology that digitalises the spaces,” said Jongyoon Kim, CEO of Yanolja Cloud. “As an AI-based global SaaS company, we will lead the digital transformation of the global industry built for spaces through advanced services and digital marketing capability.”
