This article appeared on Signal, a capital markets service, at 7:30 a.m. on August 22, 2026.
Elice Group, a modular data center company, is moving ahead with an initial public offering on the KOSDAQ market. The company filed its registration statement just one day after clearing the listing review by the Korea Exchange (KRX). At the top of its indicative price band, its market capitalization would reach 1 trillion won ($720 million), making it the largest KOSDAQ debut of the year.
Elice Group filed the registration statement with the Financial Supervisory Service and opened its KOSDAQ offering, investment banking sources said on the 21st. The company plans to offer 2.22 million new shares, with no sale of existing shares, and set an indicative price band of 70,400 to 90,500 won per share. Elice Group and its lead underwriters, Mirae Asset Securities (006800.KS) and Samsung Securities (016360.KS), will hold institutional investor roadshows and set a final offering price through bookbuilding from September 9 to 15.
Based on 11.2 million shares applied, Elice Group's market capitalization is expected to fall between 789.2 billion won and 1.01 trillion won. Even at the low end of the band, its listing-day market value would exceed that of StradVision (666 billion won), the largest KOSDAQ debut so far this year. At the top of the band, it would become the first company to enter the market with a valuation exceeding 1 trillion won since ReversMed listed in December of last year.
Founded in 2015 by CEO Kim Jae-won, Elice Group provides full-stack AI solutions built on its proprietary AI cloud technology. It is best known in the market as a company that can build a mobile modular data center (AI PMDC) within three months. More recently, it has developed a "hybrid AI infrastructure" model that securely links a client's existing data center with Elice Group's AI PMDC, drawing interest from public-sector, financial and defense firms that had struggled to adopt AI.
The company's technological edge is translating into results. On a consolidated basis, first-half revenue and operating profit came to 34.4 billion won and 10.3 billion won, respectively. In just half a year, it reached 88% of last year's full-year revenue and already more than doubled the prior year's operating profit. Backed by early investment in fixed costs, first-half EBITDA reached 23.2 billion won.
Elice Group plans to use the IPO proceeds to invest in AI infrastructure and cloud technology. At the low end of the band, the offering would bring 154.9 billion won into the company. Of that, 28.7 billion won will go toward installing four AI PMDC containers at a center in the greater Seoul area. The remaining 126.3 billion won will be invested in eight AI PMDC containers at a center in the Honam region, aimed at meeting rising demand from private companies for high-performance graphics processing unit (GPU) computing.
CEO Kim Jae-won said the company has entered a phase of strong growth on the back of its early infrastructure investment, positioning itself as a "full-stack AI partner" spanning high-performance AI cloud services to industry-specific AX solutions. "Through the KOSDAQ listing, we will solidify our leadership in South Korea's sovereign AI infrastructure and leap forward as a company that leads the global neo-cloud market," he said.
