Lotte Ventures

Lotte Ventures operates as a corporate venture capital unit investing directly from Lotte Group's balance sheet rather than through a traditional limited partner fund structure. This gives the firm flexible holding periods and removes the pressure of a fixed fund lifecycle, though it also means deployment pace can vary with the parent company's strategic priorities.

CEO Jung Ho-jin has led the unit since early 2019, overseeing both investment decisions and the team's scouting operations. Prior leadership included founding executives who set the unit's initial strategy after the 2016 launch. The firm does not publicly list a full investment committee, and specific check-size authorities are not disclosed.

Lotte Ventures concentrates on seed through Series B rounds, with an emphasis on early-stage companies that can integrate with Lotte Group's retail, logistics, hospitality, or chemical operations. The firm occasionally participates in later-stage rounds when a portfolio company's technology has already been validated within a Lotte subsidiary.

South Korea forms the core of the portfolio, but the firm maintains active scouting in the United States — particularly Silicon Valley — and in Israel's technology ecosystem. The Israel connection produced at least one publicly confirmed investment in AI21 Labs, a Tel Aviv-based developer of large language models (per the firm's official communications).

All three are Korean corporate venture arms, but Lotte Ventures draws from a conglomerate whose core operations are retail, food, chemicals, and hospitality rather than electronics or automotive manufacturing. This produces a sector appetite tilted toward retail-tech, proptech, and consumer-facing digital platforms rather than deep-tech semiconductor or mobility-hardware deals, though Lotte's chemical arm does create some materials-science overlap.