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‘Noel,’ a social venture founded in 2015, aims to address healthcare accessibility issues in low-income countries. After five years of technological development, the company launched the world’s first ‘miLab’ in 2020, capable of diagnosing malaria with just a single drop of blood, specifically designed for low-income regions with insufficient medical infrastructure. miLab automates the entire microscopy process — from blood sample preprocessing and imaging to AI analysis — providing precise diagnostic results within 15 minutes. Recognized for its technological prowess, Noel achieved a rare milestone for a social venture by successfully listing on the KOSDAQ market earlier this year. Since 2020, the company has published an annual ‘Sustainability Report,’ actively communicating its mission and philosophy to stakeholders. This represents their determination as a social venture to achieve both social and economic value.

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Social ventures share similarities with social enterprises in that both pursue social value. However, unlike social enterprises that place stronger emphasis on social impact, social ventures face the challenging task of pursuing both social and economic value simultaneously. Consequently, capital markets still often perceive social ventures as “well-meaning but unprofitable companies,” leading to an undervaluation of their corporate worth.

However, the rapid growth of social ventures has accelerated alongside the rise of ESG management. 1 1In August 2019, the Business Roundtable (BRT), a coalition of 200 major corporations in the United States, officially declared a shift from shareholder capitalism to stakeholder capitalism, signaling the advent of the “social value management” era. In response, the Korean government has been making efforts to institutionalize support systems, enacting the Social Enterprise Promotion Act in 2007 and establishing the Korea Social Enterprise Promotion Agency under the Ministry of Employment and Labor in 2010. 닫기  Typically, venture companies refer to small and medium-sized enterprises that run innovative businesses based on new business models or advanced technologies. These companies primarily focus on creating economic value through innovation. Recently, however, business models that apply advanced technology and innovation to solve social problems have been increasing, along with growing interest in social value. This is also confirmed by the numbers. According to the ‘2021 Social Venture Status Survey’ by the Ministry of SMEs and Startups, the number of domestic social ventures (as of August last year) more than doubled from 998 in 2019 to 2,031 in 2021. The average revenue also increased. In 2020, the average revenue of social ventures was 2.895 billion KRW, an 18.5% increase from the 2.444 billion KRW in 2019. The scale of investment also grew. Social venture companies received a total of 267.1 billion KRW in impact investment in 2020. This is more than nine times the 28.2 billion KRW invested in 2019.

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