Korean startup gobbler Yello Mobile acquires 5 travel apps

Yello Mobile, the Seoul-based firm that eats startups like Kobayashi eats hot dogs, announced today it has acquired five more companies through Yello Travel, its travel subsidiary.

According to Yello Travel, the new firms under its wing include: Eses Global, which offers guest house booking; Hikari Global, which provides hotel and car reservations in Japan, Hong Kong, and Southeast Asia; TNT Tour, which provides tours and other travel packages in Japan, Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan;  World Travel, which provides booking for cities in the Philippines, and YRM, a business-to-business travel agency.

Judging by their websites, these services appear to be primarily serving Koreans who are traveling to other parts of the world.

Yello Mobile is one of the more unusual companies to come out of the startup world in Asia. As explained in an excellent TechCrunch piece, it buys early-stage startups that are seeing respectable-but-unimpressive growth on the cheap. It then attempts to cross promote them with its other portfolio companies in an effort to bring them back to speed. Tellingly, several of its 60-plus portfolio companies are ad networks, including Future Stream Networks, which TechCrunch writes is the second-largest in Korea. Ultimately, the company aims to become a “mobile media company” that monetizes a range of apps through ads.

Yello Mobile recently reported that it had 10 million users across its portfolio, and singled out daily deals app Coocha and Buzzfeed-esque Pikicast as two of its hits. In addition to Yello Travel, the company has four other subsidiaries – one for marketing and advertising, one for shopping, one for offline-to-online services, and one for content and communication.

Investors are pleased with Yello’s vision – the company closed a US$100 million funding round from Formation8 last autumn, which valued it at over US$1 billion.

Editing by Steven Millward; image by Tyler Durden