In the past month, we have seen top Asian countries expand their horizons to European markets by buying out or investing in some of their top companies. Looks like Europe is taking things the other way around, more specifically a startup accelerator from Berlin, Germany called Team Europe making their foray to the Korean market. They already announced their first startup they are investing in, which is Yogiyo, described as an Asian version of Delivery Hero. In other words, Yogiyo is an online food delivery service. They are establishing themselves at Seoul and also announced a partnership with Fast Track Asia, another startup accelerator at Korea, to continue building up the startup community over there. Ludolf Ebner-Chung (pictured above), the branch manager of Team Europe, also expects to help out with entrepreneurship at Korea especially with those up and coming. Currently, Team Europe is only interested in B2C companies with focuses in the social, commercial, and mobile spaces.

Before this key decision to enter the Korean market, Team Europe has been successful already accelerating startups. Targeted companies by them achieve a value of about $13,000 in just two to three years, but that number increases tenfold to about $878,000 in four to five years. Their approach to using their experience and networking skills as support to invest in startups for the long term. A startup’s growth is important to Team Europe without risking much resources hence why values of startups they accelerated in the past achieve that much. They see potential in the Korean startup market as well as bringing their knowledge of entrepreneurship beyond Europe. They also hope that Seoul can be a hub for them at Asia, so they can expand to other countries of the region. Korea is a great place to start for a major startup accelerator like Team Europe and expect them to expand to other countries such as Japan and China once they’re able to get things going. I’m also curious to see if they will bring their efforts to the more rising markets I have mentioning here like Myanmar and Indonesia too.