Korea's biggest 2026 IPO stumbles: Elice falls 30% despite 389x-covered book
What's the deal? Elice, a Seoul-based AI infrastructure company, fell as much as 32% on its Kosdaq debut on October 20, after raising about US$168.6M (roughly $700 million market value) in Kosdaq's biggest IPO of 2026. The stock, priced at US$75.9 — the top of its range — traded as low as US$51.1, cutting its pre-listing valuation of US$842.9M to around US$586.9M.
What led up to it? Demand looked overwhelming. Institutions oversubscribed the book 388.84 times, while retail investors poured roughly US$8.64B in deposits for a 408-to-1 subscription ratio.
Elice also showed growth: first-half revenue rose 200% to US$28.8M, and it swung to an operating profit of US$8.64M.
What's the endgame? Founded in 2015 by three KAIST doctoral students, Elice started as a coding-education platform before pivoting to AI cloud infrastructure. It plans to use the proceeds to build AI data centres and expand into the US, Japan, and Singapore.
What could go wrong? The debut tests appetite for capital-intensive AI infrastructure as global sentiment cools. "Sentiment toward AI infrastructure has been highly volatile and often disconnected from underlying fundamentals," said Albert Yong, chief investment officer at Petra Capital Management.
The backdrop is unfriendly. Nvidia-backed Firmus scrapped its Sydney listing, CoreWeave has more than halved from its May peak, and AirTrunk is delaying a planned REIT IPO.
The signal: The gap between heavy subscription demand and investors' willingness to pay points to a tougher valuation test for AI businesses. In a Korean IPO market that has raised roughly $1.4 billion so far in 2026 — down from more than $3 billion in each of the prior three years — oversubscription no longer guarantees a strong open.
Read more: CNBC, The Straits Times, Seoul Economic Daily, CryptoNews, Chosun Biz, Bloomberg
Image credit: hyolee2 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)
