Sophie Soowon Eom and the work between the work

Before Sophie Soowon Eom was selling software to marketers, she was cooking for employees. She and Olivier Duchenne had left well-paid jobs to build Solidware, their financial technology startup, at home. An artificial intelligence business still needed lunch. The domestic detail is a useful place to begin: her career concerns sophisticated systems, but the problems that send her into business tend to be wonderfully practical.

Solidware applied machine learning to financial risk. Adriel, her second company, grew from the difficulty of getting a business noticed. In between sits a question familiar to anyone who has made something and then tried to sell it: how much of your working day disappears into the machinery surrounding the work?

Eom has spent years trying to reduce that disappearance. Her answer has changed shape, from automated advertising to a shared marketing dashboard and, more recently, AI-assisted analysis. The continuity is more interesting than the labels. She keeps looking for the place where information becomes cumbersome, expensive or hard to use, then builds a company around making it usable.

The finance founder who had to make lunch

Her education paired chemistry and business at Seoul National University, followed by a master's in finance at HEC Paris. She graduated from HEC in 2012. Consulting at Oliver Wyman and work at AXA followed. This was a route into established financial institutions before it became a route out of them.

At AXA, she saw an opportunity to improve credit assessment with machine learning. Eom and Duchenne founded Solidware in 2014. He was both her husband and her business partner. Their first company gave them a shared working history before Adriel acquired its first customers, a useful distinction in an industry where founding teams are often assembled around an idea still awaiting a test.

The home-based beginning puts some texture on the familiar phrase “bootstrapped startup.” There were salaries to leave behind and costs to contain. Cooking for the team was one of those economies. It is easy to imagine entrepreneurship as a succession of pitches; this part of Eom's record has a kitchen attached.

Solidware was subsequently acquired by the group now known as DAYLI Financial Group. Eom's first venture had reached an exit, but the experience supplied another business problem. Building analytical software had not made marketing simple. A founder can understand a customer's data and still struggle to find that customer in the first place.

Five minutes to an advertisement

Adriel was established in late 2017 and began operating in early 2018. Its initial proposition was aimed at businesses without much money or marketing expertise. By 2019, the service could pull material from a client's website and produce campaigns for Facebook, Instagram and Google in about five minutes.

That promise was concrete enough to matter to a small business owner. Campaigns required platform-specific formats, suitable images and decisions about placement. Each requirement might be manageable on its own; together, they created an awkward second occupation for someone already running a company.

By October 2019, Eom reported 2,000 clients across more than 20 countries. The service was available in Korean, English, Japanese and French. The geography arrived early. Adriel was solving a problem that followed the advertising platforms across borders, which gave a Seoul-based business a reason to think beyond Seoul from the beginning.

Her earlier finance business had also been designed for international customers. In a 2017 discussion of Solidware, she described tailoring models to individual financial institutions and integrating them into clients' own systems. Some customers could not simply hand their data to an outside company. The software had to meet the institution where it worked.

That is a revealing precedent for Adriel. Eom's businesses address the gap between having information and being able to put it to work. The setting changes. Credit analysis and campaign reporting involve different customers and different constraints. In both, a useful product must fit an existing working environment, with all its inconvenient habits.

Twenty accounts, nine channels, one person asking why

As Adriel developed, the problem widened. Businesses were advertising across more channels, collecting more measurements and trying to compare results. A dashboard became central to the proposition. In March 2022, Eom said the average brand advertiser on Adriel managed 20 advertising accounts with campaigns across nine channels.

The numbers make the difficulty legible. Twenty accounts mean twenty places where something may need attention. Nine channels mean different ways of buying advertising and measuring its performance. A report is supposed to help a person decide what to do next. Preparing it can become an occupation in itself.

Adriel raised a $13 million Series B that month, led by Shinhan Venture Investment. The product direction included better connections with advertising platforms and more collaboration between teams. For Eom, the useful unit of progress was increasingly the whole advertising operation: information arriving, people comparing it, and a decision following.

In a later 2022 conversation, she described the missing product she had wanted as a marketing equivalent of a war room. The metaphor is expressive without being especially glamorous. A war room earns its keep by letting people see the same situation. Nobody benefits if the crucial update remains in somebody else's browser tab.

“It's a system and it's also a culture.”Sophie Soowon Eom on AdOps, 2022

Her definition of advertising operations extended to the habits around the software. Centralize the information, make the analysis consistent, then respond to changes. In her telling, a dashboard belonged inside a working practice. Its value depended on what people could do once they saw the numbers together.

The customer as an inconvenient teacher

Eom's account of building an international business contains a pleasingly unruly moment. An American teenager entered Adriel's support chat looking for advice about becoming a K-pop star. She gave him some life advice. The encounter also exposed the distance between attracting attention and attracting a customer.

She became more deliberate about reaching software buyers through Product Hunt, AppSumo and review communities. Prospective customers supplied blunt comparisons with other products. Her response included studying more than 30 competitors. The resulting portrait is of a founder willing to let a sales conversation disturb her assumptions.

There is a particular kind of courage in asking somebody why they might buy from a rival. The answer arrives without the comforting manners of a congratulatory introduction. Customers have budgets, alternatives and deadlines. Their questions can make a carefully rehearsed product explanation sound oddly incomplete.

This is the personal thread running through Eom's public accounts: she pays attention to friction, including the friction in her own business. A founder who sells clarity must also tolerate the moments when a customer makes things less clear. The uncomfortable comparison becomes material for the next product decision.

A larger table, beyond advertising

Her career has also taken her into discussions about technology beyond her own products. In 2017, she was named to Forbes' Asia 30 Under 30 list in Finance and Venture Capital. The recognition came from her Solidware work, before Adriel's dashboard business developed.

In July 2018, she joined the UN Secretary-General's High-Level Panel on Digital Cooperation. Melinda Gates and Jack Ma co-chaired it; other members included Vinton Cerf. The members served in their personal capacities. Eom participated as an entrepreneur with experience of building AI businesses.

The panel published The Age of Digital Interdependence in 2019. Its remit was international cooperation around digital technology, giving her a place in a conversation much broader than campaign performance. The connection is worth keeping in proportion: membership establishes participation, rather than authorship of every recommendation.

She has continued to appear in founder communities. La French Tech Seoul included her in its 2021 Female Founders in Korea event. At VivaTech in 2023, she joined a discussion of Korea's startup ecosystem with Fleur Pellerin and deputy minister Lim Jung-wook. Her working geography includes the spaces between Korea, France and the United States.

These connections fit a career built across disciplines and borders. Chemistry, business, finance, consulting and software are all present in her record. The point is not that each qualification predicts a startup. It is that her route offers several ways to recognize a business problem before deciding what sort of product might address it.

The next question is already in the dashboard

By the end of 2024, Adriel reported 170 product updates during the year and more than 40 new connectors. Among the additions were AI Insights and custom connections for bringing different kinds of data into the product. The practical work of maintaining the dashboard continued alongside the newer AI features.

A connector is a modest-sounding thing. It matters because a question about performance is only useful if the relevant information can reach the place where it will be answered. Faster analysis cannot compensate for a missing part of the picture. Eom's current direction keeps that underlying data work close to the analytical ambition.

In March 2026, she described Adriel as marketing data infrastructure used in 28 countries. She named Publicis and Dentsu among its customers. AI agents were extending the dashboard's role: marketers could ask questions in ordinary language about changes in performance and receive analysis based on connected data.

Her stated direction was further automation of analysis and expansion in North America and Japan. The aspiration remains recognizable from her first business: reduce the effort required to turn a mass of information into a useful judgment. There is still a person making that judgment, with a business to run and a finite afternoon.

The kitchen at Solidware and the dashboard at Adriel belong in the same story. Each concerns the work that accumulates around the work you meant to do. Eom began by finding ways to keep a small team operating. She now builds software intended to give other teams more time for their next decision. Lunch, one hopes, can happen on schedule.