Pacific Alliance Ventures aims to back technical founders building category-defining Silicon Valley companies and help them expand into Korea.
We are thrilled to announce Pacific Alliance Ventures (PAV), the US investment arm of the Shinsegae Group.
PAV exists to partner with highly technical, excessively obsessed founders tackling deeply consequential problems — the kind that reshape industries, expand human potential, and unlock step-change operational productivity.
At first glance, you might wonder why the world needed “yet another VC fund,” and you’d be exactly right to ask. After all, the best founders rarely struggle to raise capital.
Funnily enough, PAV didn’t start as a fund idea. It started with a go-to-market problem we kept seeing, over and over, on both sides of the Pacific.
The backdrop: a world-class operator with a planetary scale problem
Shinsegae has become one of Korea’s defining industry leaders, with a footprint across retail, commerce, real estate, hospitality and technology infrastructure. Originally part of the Samsung Group, Shinsegae spun off in the early 1990s and has been instrumental in helping global brands such as eBay, AWS Retail, Starbucks, Simon, Marriott and Paramount Global expand into Korea and navigate the lived realities of market entry: localization, partnerships, operational support, and the other unspoken minutiae that actually determine success.
With COVID-era lockdowns coming to an end, Shinsegae’s management set itself an ambitious goal: to deploy and invest in state-of-the-art technology that would define the next generation of the Korean experience.
As one of the largest distribution platforms on the peninsula, Shinsegae was operating at an immense scale and the stakes were correspondingly high. Despite clear intent, we found the structures available to execute that mandate were limited, broken and fundamentally insufficient. In trying to address these problems, we stumbled into a cascading set of realizations:
• Most Korean investors still have limited and inconsistent access to Silicon Valley’s earliest rounds, where technical breakthroughs are first translated into disruptive companies. At this stage, new primitives are forged into durable advantage and Korea - rather unfortunately - has historically been absent from the table.
• At the same time, most Silicon Valley companies still have limited access to Korea, despite it being one of the world’s most sophisticated markets across enterprise software, internet services, logistics, fintech and consumer products, and one where rapid local consumer feedback loops enable unusually fast experimentation.
The result is a gap that shows up as a persistent mismatch in technical capability, operating muscle and the institutional know-how required to deploy modern systems at scale.
The real gap isn’t capital — it’s distribution that compounds
In the US, startups routinely “sell into the valley” because the ecosystem is dense and full of design partners, early adopters, reference customers, experienced operators and credible distribution pathways. This environment is custom-made for teams to run fast with an idea and build something people want. But that go-to-market engine doesn’t extend to Korea in any meaningful way - at least not yet. PAV is designed to help bridge that gap, especially for teams building technically differentiated, category-defining products in:
• Infrastructure layers (Cloud, Data, DevOps, Security, Edge)
• AI-first systems & applications (B2B enterprise and vertical platforms)
• Consumer platforms pursuing international expansion
In other words, we aim to partner with technical founders building products with superior primitives. We’re inspired by a simple but powerful idea: enduring companies are built by deeply passionate founders (almost to a fault) who understand the ins and outs of the spaces they operate in. And we share a second belief: great investing requires more than just taste. It requires a thesis you can communicate, test and refine. More on that shortly.
We founded PAV on these principles and hope to be a net positive to the ecosystem by bringing speed, conviction and network to the founders we back.
In the words of Anton Ego: “There are times when a critic truly risks something, and that is in the discovery and defense of the new. The world is often unkind to new talent, new creations. The new needs friends.”
We aspire to be that friend the new wants to build with. If you’re a technical founder building the new, we’d love to meet you.
Announcing Pacific Alliance Ventures: Why the World Needed Yet Another VC Fund