DIVE Studios

DIVE Studios was founded in 2019 by three brothers - Brian, Eric, and Eddie Nam - and the division of labor tells you most of what you need to know. Brian, a former Division 1 soccer player and Columbia financial-economics major, runs it as CEO. Eric is a genuine K-pop star, GQ Korea's Man of the Year and a Forbes 30 Under 30 alum, and he sits behind the microphone. Eddie is the third co-founder. The setup is unusual for a media company and completely normal for a family, which is roughly the point: the company's whole pitch is that it sounds like people who actually care about the culture, because it is.

The flagship product is the Daebak Show, a podcast where Eric Nam interviews other artists and figures from the Korean entertainment world. "Daebak" (대박) is Korean slang for something spectacular - a jackpot - and the show functions as a kind of front door. You come for one interview with an artist you love, and you discover that behind it sits a whole network of shows: Get Real, a culture conversation program; Hwaiting, a K-pop game show; Here We Go, a travel series; plus a rotating shelf of celebrity games like Whisper Challenge and Silent Library. It is, structurally, the same trick daytime television figured out decades ago - anchor everything to a personality people trust, then let the formats multiply.

What is genuinely interesting about DIVE is the order of operations. Most media companies chase scale first and community later, and end up with a large audience that does not particularly care. DIVE did it backwards. It started with a fandom that already cared enormously, earned its trust with fan-first content, and let the reach follow. The reach did follow: the company reports more than five billion lifetime views and tens of millions of monthly viewers, with figures depending on the source and the month somewhere between 60 and 150 million. Roughly 38% of its podcast listeners are in North America, 36% in Asia, and 17% in Europe - which is to say the audience is not "K-pop fans in Korea." It is K-pop fans everywhere.

The money arrived in a way that would look strange if you were not paying attention to fandom. DIVE raised $8.7 million in seed funding from a lineup that included TQ Ventures - the fund co-founded by music manager Scooter Braun - along with Union Square Ventures and the co-founders of Twitch and Opendoor. That is a serious set of investors for what could be dismissed as "a K-pop podcast." But it is only strange if you underrate how far a passionate niche can travel compared with a mass audience that shrugs. The people who fund Twitch understand that a devoted community is worth more than an indifferent crowd.

DIVE turned that thesis into two businesses. On one side is DIVE Media, the content network - the shows, the podcasts, the short-form social clips. On the other is DIVE X, a creator and social agency that sells brands the one thing they cannot manufacture: credibility with Gen Z K-pop fans. Samsung, H&M, Crocs, Toyota, Alo Yoga, and Perplexity have all run campaigns through it. The logic is clean. DIVE has the audience's trust; brands rent access to it, carefully, through creators and celebrity ambassadors who already belong there. You do not buy a fandom. You earn a seat inside it, and then you charge admission.

To scale the audio side, DIVE partnered with Acast to monetize and distribute its podcasts globally, and worked with Studio71 on production and distribution. Then, in 2021, it did something a pure content-and-ads company usually would not: it spun out Mindset, a separate audio platform where celebrities narrate candid stories and reflections about mental health - the material they generally keep off stage. Funded in part by TQ Ventures, Mindset is the clearest expression of the company's actual bet, which is that the most loyal audience does not want the polished version. It wants the real one.