Schmidt

CEO Kim Hyun-joon leads the investment team, drawing on two decades of corporate venture and incubation experience at Hyundai Motor Company. Partners Kwon Jong-min, Lee Jae-won, and Shin Hyun-jae each contribute sector-specific deal leadership in mobility, digital platforms, and deeptech. The full team of roughly 10 professionals reviews every submission individually before responding.

DSC Investment is Schmidt’s parent company, described on Schmidt’s website as Korea’s largest VC. The structure channels Schmidt’s early-stage origination into DSC’s deeper follow-on capital base, creating a pipeline where Schmidt leads seed rounds and DSC can scale winners. The economics of this relationship — carry distribution, fee allocation, and decision rights — are not publicly detailed.

Schmidt operates as a direct investor writing first checks into startups. The firm’s 24-fund structure suggests it manages multiple pools of capital, likely including both direct investment vehicles and co-investment funds alongside parent DSC Investment and third-party LPs. The firm does not disclose whether it commits capital to other GPs’ funds.

Schmidt invests from seed through growth stages, as stated on its own website. The firm starts with early-stage, thesis-driven bets — often at the angel or seed round — and reserves capacity to follow on through later rounds, contributing to a reported 77% follow-on funding rate across its portfolio.

Schmidt does not publish a formal exclusion list. Its investment focus is concentrated on mobility, bio, deeptech, and digital transformation, suggesting sectors outside these four verticals are not actively targeted. The firm’s thesis-driven model implies it avoids industries where it cannot construct a proprietary, domain-informed investing hypothesis.

As a subsidiary of DSC Investment, Schmidt’s primary co-investment channel is internal to the DSC platform. The firm does not publicly describe a practice of syndicating with unaffiliated VCs, though its TIPS operator role creates a structured co-investment dynamic with government-linked funding. LP-side co-investment policies are not disclosed.

No philanthropic foundation or non-profit vehicle is disclosed. Schmidt’s adjacent relationships are commercial: startup ERP provider Ttukttuk, PR firm Team Cookie, and law firm Mission. TIPS operator status links the firm to government R&D programs, but that is a policy-driven, for-profit infrastructure arrangement rather than a charitable arm.