Korea Investment Partners, South Korea’s largest venture capital firm, said Wednesday that together with AJU IB Investment, it had invested 2 billion won ($1.8 million) in ZOYI Corporation.

ZOYI is a Korean tech start-up that offers a service called “Walk Insights” enabling it to analyze customer data in real time for offline retail stores via sensors, and smartphone Wi-Fi and Bluetooth telecommunications technologies.

The company analyzes data such as the number of customer visits and revisits to offline stores, their purchase conversion rates and the length of their visits. Until now, these business analytics had only been possible for online retailers, noted Korea Investment Partners, the VC subsidiary of Korea Investment Holdings.

ZOYI has developed indigenous sensors and placed some 1,500 of them at 350 small and large retail stores in Korea and Japan as of the end of last year.

“There will be growing demand for data analytics by offline stores, and we believe (ZOYI’s) Walk Insights offers the best,” said Park Young-ho, senior principal of Korea Investment Partners.

ZOYI said it planned to build an online-to-offline business by developing big data solutions with the Series A investment the start-up received from Korea Investment Partners and AJU IB. “We will fully support the company to grow as we believe in ZOYI CEO Choi Si-won and the start-up,” said Jang Sang-hyuk, principal of Korea Investment Partners.

ZOYI CEO Choi said, “It will invest in product development and marketing to make Walk Insights the global standard service in customer data analytics.”

Korea Investment Partners is known for having invested in Kakao, the operator of Korea’s most used mobile messenger, and 4:33, a mobile game publisher and developer known for its sword-fighting fantasy game “Blade.”

ZOYI received its seed funding from BonAngels and Fast Track Asia.

By Park Hyong-ki (hkp@heraldcorp.com)