Scatter Lab Achieves Record Performance in 2025 Since Its Founding... Succeeds in Turnaround to Profitability Driven by 'zeta' Sensation

Scatter Lab achieved in 2025 its highest performance since its founding and succeeded in a massive turnaround to profitability, driven by the explosive success of its artificial intelligence (AI) character platform 'zeta'. Notably, the revenue generated in 2025 reached an all-time high, far exceeding the total cumulative revenue from the company's establishment up to 2024.

According to Scatter Lab's income statement, annual revenue in 2025 was approximately 26.7 billion won, surging more than fivefold compared to the previous year (5.1 billion won in 2024). Profitability indicators also achieved remarkable improvements. While it recorded an operating loss of about 4 billion won in 2024, it posted an operating profit of approximately 2.75 billion won and a net income of 3.2 billion won in 2025, proving its strong profit-generating capability.

Scatter Lab's turnaround to profitability stands out even more when compared to competitors whose deficits are widening despite top-line growth. In the case of Tain AI, which operates the competing chatbot service 'Lovey-Dovey' and ranks 7th in global revenue, it recorded revenue of 33.8 billion won in 2025—up from 10.2 billion won in revenue and an operating loss of 5.2 billion won in 2024. However, while it achieved top-line growth, its operating loss actually widened significantly to 12.5 billion won. Unlike Tain AI, which only increased its revenue scale and showed limitations in cost management, Scatter Lab displayed a stark contrast in profitability by dramatically improving its operating margin alongside explosive revenue growth.

The core driving force behind this massive earnings rebound lies in the success of the interactive AI platform 'zeta' and a proprietary cost reduction structure. Zeta, which gained sensational popularity centered around those in their teens and twenties, reached an average daily app retention time of 2 hours and 40 minutes in South Korea and 3 hours and 40 minutes in Japan, achieving an overwhelming level of immersion that surpasses major platforms like YouTube and Netflix. Based on this massive retention time, Scatter Lab successfully established a business model in the market that combines mid-roll advertising revenue exposed to free users with a paid subscription model, 'zeta Pro'. In particular, rather than relying on expensive external large language model (LLM) APIs, the full introduction of its own small language model (sLM) 'Spotlight-1 (Spotwrite-1)', optimized for the 'fun performance' of conversations, reduced operating costs to near zero (0). This vertical integration was reportedly the decisive factor behind the turnaround to profitability.

Massive success in the global market, especially in Japan, also strongly drove earnings growth. Zeta, which entered Japan in May of last year, swept the top spot in entertainment-type AI services in Japan by surpassing 200,000 daily active users (DAU) and 1.1 billion won in monthly revenue as of December 2025. It wrote an overwhelming success story for overseas expansion by surpassing South Korea in all key indicators, including retention time and average revenue per user (ARPU).

Overcoming the controversies experienced during the past 'Luda' era and establishing a thorough AI ethics foundation to the point of being cited as an exemplary case for the Korea Communications Commission's guidelines, Scatter Lab is now ready to take another leap forward. Using the successful profitability verification through its proprietary AI model and the experience of successfully settling into the Japanese market as a stepping stone, the company plans to enter English-speaking markets, including North America, in the second half of 2025 to be reborn as a 'global AI fiction platform with 100 million users'.