Most Employees Have Left, Only the CEO Remains... 'Medical Metaverse' Leader Newbase Faces Crisis of Survival

Recently, the edtech company 'Newbase', which has pioneered the medical education market combining digital healthcare and the metaverse, has been pushed to a crisis of survival due to severe financial deterioration and a staff exodus. While some interpret this as the result of the metaverse bubble bursting, considering the growth of the global industry and the perspectives of the industry, the dominant analysis is that rather than "the medical metaverse industry itself being wrong," it is largely characterized as a scale-up failure where an individual company showed limits in creating a recurring revenue structure in a market with a slow commercialization pace.

■ The Explosively Growing Global Medical Metaverse Market... Demand is Certain

According to global market research data, the size of South Korea's healthcare metaverse market is estimated at $5.1 billion in 2024, and is projected to grow at an average annual rate of 24.2% from 2026 to 2033, reaching $30.4 billion by 2033. This is because, going through the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been a surge in demand for virtual environments that can overcome geographical barriers and provide continuous medical education safely without the risk of infection. Existing medical practice materials are expensive, practical training time is insufficient, and consumable costs are high; due to these limitations, the need for simulation education to replace them is becoming a growing trend.

■ "Revising Hundreds of Times and Visiting Hospitals Blindly"... Newbase's Fierce Struggle

Newbase did not hit a limit from the beginning. Rather, it knocked on the doors of the field more fiercely than anyone else and made painstaking efforts to refine its products. CEO Park Sun-young, a Korean literature major and user experience (UX) design expert, jumped in blindly after noticing a lack of services reflecting user experience in the medical market. In the early days, she slept only 2 to 3 hours a day to create business proposals and even visited Severance Hospital blindly.

To enhance medical realism, she read hundreds of papers and acquired medical knowledge by holding onto hospital medical staff to receive what felt like private tutoring for things she didn't know. The company experienced the hardship of revising the program hundreds of times with advice from medical staff to implement the stiffness and sagging of a virtual patient lying down and to match the reaction speed of pupil constriction. Furthermore, it showed the persistence to collect, analyze, and patternize over 1 million cases of patient data held by hospitals and educational institutions. In addition, despite being an early-stage startup, it staked its life on securing top talent by granting stock options to all employees and introducing remote and flexible work systems.

■ Relentless Partnerships and Refinements... But the Unsurmountable Wall of 'Commercialization'

As a result, it successfully launched 'Nursebase', a virtual reality (VR)-based nursing simulation, and the integrated platform 'Medicrew', supplying its solutions to numerous universities and public medical institutions such as Seoul Women's College of Nursing and Sunchon National University. In 2024, it formed partnerships with the Nursing Research Institute, the Korean Hospital Association, and others, and in March 2025, it even signed an MOU with PuzzleAI for platform enhancement combining artificial intelligence (AI) voice recognition.

However, these painstaking efforts and external collaborations did not quickly lead to significant revenue and meaningful operating profit for the company. Industrial hurdles that delayed commercialization—until the new digital simulation education could break through the conservative walls of existing educational infrastructure and establish itself as an essential hospital budget item—held Newbase back.

■ 4.5 Billion Won in Cumulative Investment Evaporates... Painful Restructuring and Exodus of Personnel

According to Pitchdeck, Newbase garnered high expectations in April 2022 by attracting a Series A investment of 4 billion won from BNH Investment, Timefolio Asset Management, Digital Healthcare Partners (DHP), and others. At the time, its estimated corporate value was 24 billion won.

However, the financial indicators were dismal. While revenue only gradually increased from 200 million won in 2020 to 880 million won in 2024, operating losses exceeded 1 billion won every year, failing to narrow the deficit gap. Despite attracting more than 4.5 billion won in cumulative investments, its deficit also piled up to the level of 4.5 billion won, indicating that most of the investment funds have been depleted. As a result, entering 2025, it had to undergo two rounds of painful restructuring, and it is estimated that the number of employees, which once exceeded 30, has now dwindled to just one or two employees left, excluding the CEO herself.

It is reasonable to view the cause of the survival crisis Newbase currently faces as "the result of a combination of high entry barriers and the slow commercialization pace of the medical metaverse industry." Ultimately, for Newbase to overcome this crisis and survive, it will have to prove more strongly to the market that the technical efforts it has poured in do not remain as a simple one-time experience or auxiliary material, but are rather a core infrastructure that substantially reduces hospital costs and guarantees essential education in the era of AI transition.