Sanghoon Park’s first job after business school was to decide which founders deserved backing. A decade later, he was explaining why he wanted the people in his own company to become entrepreneurs. Somewhere between those two positions lies an education that no business school can quite package: the difference between assessing an organization and being responsible for one.
Park is co-founder and CEO of Illimis Therapeutics, established in Seoul in 2021. His career has passed through academic research, venture capital, executive jobs, and an earlier startup. The route is worth following because its turns explain something about the company he is trying to build. He has spent time on several sides of the same table. Eventually, he had to provide the table.
The investor changes seats
Before the investment meetings came POSTECH, where Park studied life sciences and completed graduate research. Then came a change of direction: an MBA at KAIST. He credits his mentor, Professor Young Chul Sung, with encouraging that decision. It was a consequential piece of advice. A scientific education would now be accompanied by an education in how organizations obtain money, make choices, and survive them.
At KAIST, his public profile lists a strategic consulting club and a vice-presidential role in an enterprise valuation club. These are small entries beside the degrees, but they fit the direction of travel. Consulting asks how a business works. Valuation asks what someone should pay for it. Both require attention to the distance between a promising explanation and a defensible judgment.
His MBA dates, 2012 to 2013, place that business education immediately before his investment career. The sequence gives his later résumé a useful continuity. Research supplied one way of examining a claim; business training introduced another set of questions about what could be built around it. In the jobs that followed, he would have reasons to use both.
He joined Aju IB Investment in 2013 and later worked at Partners Investment. Across roughly four years in venture investing, encounters with U.S. portfolio companies made an impression. He saw investors whose careers had already included research, company formation, development, and exits. Their investment judgment rested on operating experience. He became interested in going back into industry himself.
His subsequent roles included CBO at SL BiGen and CFO at SL VaxiGen. The initials are tidy. The work they describe is less so: business development and finance, two functions that make plans answer to other people. An appealing idea must eventually find a counterpart willing to commit something to it.
A company with more than one author
By 2017, Park was helping establish Amyloid Solution. He later described the experience in practical terms: assembling a team, raising money, and laying the foundations of the business. These are useful verbs for a founder’s biography. They keep the story close to work that actually has to be done, with colleagues who must agree to do it.
In early 2021, professors Wonsuk Chung and Chanhyuk Kim approached him about co-founding another company. Illimis followed. The arrangement combined university-originated work with someone prepared to run an independent organization. Park’s previous experience gave him a reason to think about that division deliberately, rather than leave it for everyone to discover after incorporation.
He later advocated a structure in which academic co-founders can retain their university work while operating leadership has responsibility for management and hiring. In that account, the person running the business also receives a substantial ownership position. It is a view about accountability: authority to make decisions should accompany responsibility for the consequences.
University spinouts can begin with a compelling piece of intellectual property and several people with different jobs. The company then needs its own habits and obligations. Park’s interest in the structure suggests that he regards the founding agreement as part of the enterprise itself. The signatures are only the beginning of the relationship.
Learning to ask for the right thing
Illimis won the 2023 Seoul-BMS Innovation Square Challenge. The award brought access to a year of mentoring and coaching. By July 2024, Park was describing what that access meant in practice: feedback involving the global organization and opportunities for his business development colleagues to communicate with people in the United States.
His advice to other companies was specific. Present evidence honestly and objectively. Explain the kind of cooperation you want. A large potential partner has many interests; a small company has to make its own request intelligible. The burden of clarity belongs, at least partly, to the person asking for a meeting.
There is a recognizable former investor in that advice. A presentation has an audience with its own decisions to make. The number of slides cannot settle those decisions on its own. Neither can enthusiasm, although founders are rarely accused of arriving with too little of it. A useful proposal gives the other side something precise to consider.
The international relationships accumulated. Illimis joined Johnson & Johnson’s JLABS Singapore network in 2024. In October that year, it began a collaboration through Lilly’s Catalyze360-ExploR&D. For Park, the company-building story increasingly involved people outside the company. An independent business still has to learn how to work in company.
“Humbled by the support”
Park’s LinkedIn response to the Series B announcement
When the map acquires a second pin
Capital arrived in stages. Illimis announced a KRW 20 billion Series A in April 2023. In July 2025, it announced a KRW 58 billion Series B, described at the time as approximately $42 million. The latter round included eight existing investors and ten new ones. Among the returning names was Aju IB Investment, an earlier employer on Park’s own résumé.
That connection makes a neat biographical circle, although a circle on paper is no substitute for a financing decision. The company had to attract support as a business in its own right. Returning investors and newcomers were committing to the organization Park and his colleagues were now running.
Company financing rounds, shown on the same scale. These figures describe capital raised by Illimis.
By June 2026, the company’s overview reported cumulative fundraising of $66.4 million. That total describes resources entrusted to an enterprise. The familiar temptation is to read a funding figure as a verdict. In daily company life, it is also a budget, a set of commitments, and a longer list of decisions waiting to be made.
September 2025 brought another address. Illimis announced a Boston research base at Lilly Gateway Labs and a U.S. subsidiary led by Suchul Jang. Jungu Bae, already responsible for research strategy, was dispatched to Boston. The expansion therefore involved named people and assignments, as well as a new pin on a map.
Park described the move as a foundation for collaboration. The distinction matters in the ordinary organizational sense. Renting space is a transaction. Making a distant office useful to colleagues and partners takes continuing work. The company’s geography had widened; its leaders now had to make that geography function.
The people who could start the next company
Inside the organization, Park describes his preferred approach as that of a “servant leader.” He emphasizes listening and reducing unnecessary formality. His stated ambition includes helping employees develop into founders themselves. Internal seminars, in which colleagues share knowledge and experience, are one mechanism he describes for broadening what people understand about the business around them.
An employer who wants future entrepreneurs on the payroll faces an interesting proposition. Entrepreneurship involves judgment and initiative. Those qualities require opportunities to practice, including situations where the answer has not already been supplied by the person with the largest office. Park’s ambition puts the development of colleagues inside the definition of company building.
The idea also appears in another employee’s account. Eunjung Lee, a group leader, identifies Park’s wish for colleagues to grow into entrepreneurs as a goal she shares. She describes wanting to become a stronger leader and a dependable collaborator. Her account gives the ambition a second voice, beyond the CEO’s own explanation of it.
Another colleague, Sojeong Lee, remembers attending a recruitment presentation where Park emphasized the importance of people. That message helped draw her interest. On her first day, she found a succulent and a welcome note on her desk. Later, she described the growing plant as a companion to her own development. Company culture occasionally arrives in a small pot.
These are employee accounts, with the personal perspective that implies. Still, their details have a useful scale. A welcome note can be written. A colleague can explain something. A new hire can find someone willing to listen. The company’s stated values place trust, cooperation, responsibility, and learning from mistakes alongside the larger ambitions.
The company calendar supplies another ordinary texture: workshops, anniversary gatherings, and year-end events. Illimis marked its fourth anniversary in August 2025 and listed another company workshop in May 2026. Behind the financing announcements are people who also have to spend working days together. A company that hopes to last needs those days to be bearable, and preferably worthwhile.
Park’s biography returns, finally, to education. His early investment work let him observe other organizations. Operating required him to make choices within them. Founding Illimis placed him among the people responsible for creating the organization itself. His wish to develop future entrepreneurs carries that sequence forward: experience acquired by one person becomes something colleagues might use in their own decisions. The next founder’s education may already have begun.