[Edaily Marketin Reporter Song Seung-Hyeon ] Products sell well on platforms like Naver and Coupang. However, it’s impossible to know who watched which videos and made a purchase. The platforms retain that data. SquadX has capitalized on this gap. The company integrates live streaming and short-form video features into companies’ own online stores and tracks which videos led to purchases. The company counts 232 firms—including Lotte Home Shopping, Amorepacific, and Hana Tour—among its clients.

According to the venture capital (VC) industry on the 17th, SquadX raised 1 billion won in seed funding from Catenoid and Gauss Capital in 2022, followed by 2.7 billion won in a pre-Series A round in 2023. KB Investment, IBK Industrial Bank of Korea, AC Pathfinder, and CNT Tech participated in the pre-Series A round. The company is currently in the midst of a Series A funding round.

SquadX was founded in February 2022. Co-CEOs Kwon Jeong-sik and Choi Young-hyun are both former CJ ENM employees. CEO Kwon spent 22 years working on broadcasting platforms, while CEO Choi spent 23 years in content and marketing. In 2013, while at CJ ENM, CEO Kwon planned a content commerce platform that linked the live TV broadcast of Mnet’s “Superstar K3” with its mobile app. Although it was South Korea’s first media commerce proposal, it did not gain traction at the time. Subsequently, Kwon worked at Catenoid on cloud-based media technology and at Mobidu on building a business-to-business (B2B) platform for live commerce. CEO Choi launched music and video services pre-installed on the Galaxy S in over 100 countries while at Samsung Electronics, and at Kakao Entertainment, he planned KakaoTV and 1theK while overseeing mergers and acquisitions (M&A) for entertainment companies.

When people think of short-form video, YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok come to mind first, but SquadX does not use these channels. CEO Kwon stated, “Setting up shop on an external platform is like building a house on someone else’s land,” adding, “We cannot obtain any data on the customer journey—how customers arrive or where they decide to make a purchase.” In a system where platforms do not share customer data, brands have no choice but to rely on the intuition of their marketing teams. The company’s key differentiator is its ability to use data to prove which videos actually drive purchase conversions and to feed those results back into production, distribution, and advertising.

Its flagship product is the shoppable video solution “BricksPlus,” which combines live streams, short-form videos, review videos, and one-on-one video consultations into a single platform. “BricksCloud,” implemented at Lotte Home Shopping, supports low-latency streaming with a latency of around 2.4 seconds. The company also operates “X-Clip,” which uses AI to automatically cut long videos into short-form clips, and “BricksAds,” an advertising solution focused on purchase conversions. Last March, it commercialized an AI chatbot within the video player for LG U+’s Galaxy S26 pre-order broadcast.

Lotte Home Shopping’s own online store hosts approximately 500 broadcasts each month, attracting 10 million monthly viewers. Hana Tour achieved a conversion rate of 11%, while LG Electronics saw a monthly increase of 3 million viewers. The renewal rate for its 232 client companies stands at 78%. Revenue grew from 500 million won in 2022 to 4.5 billion won last year, and the company reached its break-even point (BEP) last year. It has also secured CJ ENM and MBC as clients.

According to Labangba Data Lab, the domestic live commerce market reached 4.7 trillion won last year, a 35% increase from the previous year. Conversely, the number of broadcasts decreased to approximately 178,000. However, revenue per broadcast increased by more than 60%. This indicates that the competition has shifted from simply broadcasting as much as possible to a battle to drive conversions. In the B2B video commerce sector for company-owned online stores, Mobidu—CEO Kwon’s former employer—is the most direct competitor. Mobidu generated 13.1 billion won in revenue last year but posted an operating loss of 1.7 billion won.

SquadX was recently selected for the Ministry of SMEs and Startups’ Deep Tech TIPS program, securing up to 1.5 billion won in research and development (R&D) funding over three years. The project focuses on “multi-agent-based content marketing orchestration” technology, in which AI agents autonomously handle planning, ad creation, media placement, and performance analysis. The company is also preparing to enter the Asian market, using its Singapore subsidiary—established last April—as a base.