An introduction can be an expensive thing. Jeong Ju (Jay) Lee once tried to arrange his own by carrying coffee around a prospective partner’s workplace. Twenty cups, he later recalled. He also described waiting three or four hours to make a meeting look accidental. For someone who said he was shy, it was an elaborate commitment to being noticed. The future platform founder was still doing the work one conversation at a time.
Lee is the original co-founder and former co-CEO of Himedi. His business began in 2011, connecting overseas visitors with a complicated network of Korean services. Before there was a multilingual website, there were introductions, transport arrangements and the daily problem of getting people to the right place. His early experience offers a useful question for anyone impressed by an effortless booking screen: whose effort made it look that way?
The camera pointed somewhere else
Lee’s first professional world was television. He worked as a drama producer and ran a video production business. A promotional assignment brought him into contact with a sector whose customers, institutions and government representatives had trouble communicating across languages. While making a film about an industry, he encountered a business problem outside the frame.
In his account of that period, Arabic language support and the services surrounding an overseas visit were in short supply. The opportunity involved practical work: interpretation, accommodation, flights, visas, meals and trips around the city. A visitor might buy a ticket to Korea and still have an entire journey left to organise after landing.
The company initially operated under the name Widers Korea. Its later name, Himedi, paired a greeting with the sector it served. The greeting suited a concierge business: the first useful thing a company can do for a stranger is make the next conversation less awkward. A friendly name, of course, still needs someone available to answer.
By July 2019, the operation included a lounge near customers’ hotels and a round-the-clock customer centre. These were tangible investments in availability. They also make Lee’s early business easier to picture. A lounge has chairs. A customer centre has a person on the other end. The service had to exist somewhere beyond a promise.
A market with a different clock
Lee concentrated on the Middle East. The length and shape of a visit helped explain the choice. In July 2019, he described customers arriving with family members and staying for an average of 50 days. That changes the economics of hospitality. Accommodation, meals, local travel and language support become recurring needs rather than occasional extras.
It also changes the meaning of customer service. Someone staying for weeks needs more than a good arrival. The company has to keep being useful after the airport transfer is over. Familiarity with language, culture and religion becomes part of the operating model, alongside a timetable and a set of bookings.
Lee’s company was experimenting with another form of introduction, too. In June 2019, it invited Saudi broadcaster and actor Lojain Omran to Korea. He said inquiries subsequently rose 75 percent from the preceding week. That was a reported response to a particular campaign, rather than a permanent growth rate. It showed why an operator with a production background might pay attention to who tells the story.
In the same interview, first-half revenue was reported to have increased 250 percent from a year earlier. Those figures belong to 2019. Their value here is historical: they show the pace of the business as Lee began looking beyond the arrangements he could make personally.
The service components Lee described in 2019. A diagram of the work, not a measure of its scale.
Learning to stop doing everything
There was a personal cost behind the company’s beginning. Lee described selling a newly purchased home in Suwon, moving into rented accommodation and borrowing 14 million won from his mother-in-law to buy a van. He drove it himself for three years. The seed capital came with a family relationship attached, which is rather more intimate than a pitch competition.
His education in the business was consequently close to the ground. He knew the work from the driver’s seat. But the next stage called for experience he did not possess. In 2017, he recruited former Yogiyo executive Donkyo Seo after eight months of persuasion. In 2019, he brought in Yoo Kwang-jin, who had worked on Kakao T.
Lee credited Seo with setting the platform effort in motion. His explanation of hiring was unusually direct. In translation: “For a company to succeed, you have to bring in people bigger than the founder.” That is a demanding recruitment brief. It asks the founder to recognise that becoming less indispensable can be evidence of progress.
“For a company to succeed, you have to bring in people bigger than the founder.”
Jeong Ju Lee, 2021 · translated from Korean
Putting experience into a screen
By January 2020, Lee was talking about the limits of doing each task manually. He pointed to the growth of Toss, Yogiyo and Baedal Minjok as examples of online businesses making ordinary activities easier. His ambition was to take accumulated service experience and make it usable through a platform.
The details he wanted to organise included hotel preferences, halal restaurants and places visitors liked to spend their free time. These are modest pieces of information until somebody needs them in an unfamiliar city. A database becomes useful when it remembers the questions a newcomer has not yet learned to ask.
His distinction between assembling listings and using operational experience mattered. A long menu can leave a customer with more homework. An informed recommendation should remove some. Lee’s proposed advantage was the knowledge earned through years of arranging visits, rather than simply the number of names that could fit on a screen.
That makes the platform project an extension of his earlier work. The ambition was to let more people benefit from the experience of a service team. The design question was how much of that judgement could travel through software while remaining useful to someone who had never been to Korea.
Money arrived with a larger brief
Outside capital gave that project more room. Murex Partners backed Himedi with 2 billion won in 2018. It returned with another 2 billion won in the April 2020 financing. Repeat investment matters in a company’s history because it records a decision made after an investor has had time to watch the work.
The full April round amounted to 6 billion won. White Star Capital led it, alongside Lighthouse Combine Investment, Solidus Investment and Murex. It was described at the time as White Star’s first direct investment in a Korean startup. The planned use of the money included developing the platform and expanding internationally.
Individual rounds. The December 2021 announcement put cumulative funding at 11 billion won.
In December 2021, TBT led a further 3 billion won round, with White Star participating again. The announcement put cumulative investment at 11 billion won. The platform had launched the previous year. Funding descriptions varied between announcements, so the amounts and dates offer the clearer thread through this period.
The producer returns, in Arabic
Another part of the business would have looked familiar to Lee’s former profession. Himedi developed Hikuri, a YouTube channel aimed at Arabic-speaking audiences. By May 2021, it reported more than 100,000 subscribers and 6.4 million cumulative views. Those are figures from that announcement, rather than present-day channel statistics.
The programmes included Korean culture, the lives of Arab residents in Korea and reactions to Arab cultural material. Himedi colleagues Lee Jin-joo and Choi Ye-seul appeared in the videos. The company said 99.9 percent of the channel’s subscribers were from the Middle East.
Here was a different route into the same geographical challenge: make Korea familiar before someone has to navigate it. Food, language and daily life give a distant destination some texture. A video can offer a first acquaintance long before a booking becomes relevant. Lee’s early career and his later company had found a practical point of contact.
A website still needs an address
Expansion also took a physical form. In April 2022, Himedi announced an office in Ulaanbaatar, staffed by three specialist coordinators. Their responsibilities included customer acquisition, partner management and local promotion. A business moving online was putting people on the ground in another country.
That pairing is revealing. International reach creates local tasks: answering questions, explaining a service and keeping relationships working. A website can cross a border immediately. Trust tends to arrive by a slower route, with a name, a conversation and someone who understands the place.
At the beginning of 2022, Lee had set out ambitions to expand beyond existing markets in Mongolia, Russia, the Middle East and Kazakhstan into Southeast Asia and English-speaking countries. These were stated plans. Their breadth shows how far his brief had travelled from arranging the next individual visit.
By December that year, he was listed among the private-sector participants for Korea’s seventh National Tourism Strategy Meeting. The former producer who had once worked to secure an introduction now had a place in a national discussion about tourism. His career had accumulated a different set of rooms to enter.
The appealing part of Lee’s story is how much work sits between its milestones. A van, a lounge, an eight-month recruitment effort, an Arabic video channel, a local office: each solves a different problem of distance. Together they suggest why a booking can look simple only after a company has learned how much surrounds it.
The screen is the part a customer sees. Lee’s early career was spent discovering the rest.