Build Block is a Korea-founded real estate company that gives Korean investors and companies a single, end-to-end path into the U.S. property market. What began as a cross-border investment platform lowering the barrier for individual Asian investors has grown into a full-stack operator: brokerage, architectural design and permitting, construction management as a general contractor, and post-investment asset and facility management. Today it also builds the physical backbone of the AI economy - data centers and EPC plants for semiconductor, battery, and advanced manufacturing - for Korean firms reshoring to the United States.
Josh Lee is the Co-Founder and CEO of Swit Technologies Inc., a San Francisco-based enterprise Work OS that unifies team chat and task management into a single platform. A former English teacher from Korea who turned his frustration with fragmented collaboration tools into a $20M ARR business, Lee launched Swit in March 2019 with co-founder Max Lim. Today, over 40,000 teams across 184 countries use Swit, which has raised $85.8M in total funding including a $32.7M Series B in 2022. Lee has pioneered the 'Super Work' framework for AI-era collaboration and unveiled Swit Snap, an AI co-pilot, at Google Next 24 in April 2024.
Junhwan Kim is the CEO of STRADVISION, a South Korean AI perception company building the vision software that teaches cars to see. After selling his facial recognition startup Olaworks to Intel in 2012 - the first full acquisition of a Korean firm by Intel - he pivoted into automotive AI and helped build STRADVISION into a company with over 3 million cumulative production units deployed, $331M in total funding, and a pending KOSDAQ IPO. His flagship product, SVNet, runs on 50+ vehicle models across 13+ OEM partners and can identify pedestrians, lanes, traffic signs, and obstacles in real time on low-power edge chips.
STRADVISION is a Korean automotive AI company building SVNet, a deep-learning vision perception software that lets cars see and understand the road in real time. Its lightweight networks run on low-power automotive chips and ship in production vehicles from more than a dozen global automakers.
Upstage is a South Korea-born, US-expanding AI company building Solar - a family of frontier large language models - alongside Document AI tools that turn messy PDFs, scans, and contracts into structured data for enterprise workflows.
Jin Ho Hur is a Co-Founder and General Partner at HRZ Han River Partners, a Menlo Park-based early-stage venture capital firm that bridges Silicon Valley and Korea's tech ecosystem. A PhD in Computer Science from KAIST and a serial entrepreneur who built and led internet companies in Korea from the mid-1990s, Hur helped shape the country's early internet economy and served as Chairperson of the Korea Internet Association. He later transitioned into institutional investing via Translink Investment before co-founding Han River Partners, which in October 2024 launched a $100 million fund focused on AI and consumer sectors within the 'Korea Graph.' He also writes the popular Substack newsletter 'Two Cents,' covering global tech and startup trends for over 9,000 subscribers.
Steven Lee is a Venture Partner and founding member of Draper Athena (DFJ Athena), where he focuses on deep-tech investments spanning agricultural productivity, biomanufacturing, and automation. An MIT-trained electrical engineer with a US patent in internet-based audio transmission, he bridges the worlds of hands-on technology and venture capital. Before co-founding Draper Athena, he led US investments for STIC International, a global VC fund operating across the US, China, and Korea, and worked at Athena Technology Ventures, Chromatic Research, and InVision Interactive. With over 13 years of engineering and startup experience before entering venture, Steven brings rare technical depth to the table at one of Silicon Valley's most storied VC lineages.
Sungmo Park is Partner and Head of APAC Go-to-Market at a16z crypto, leading Andreessen Horowitz's first Asian office in Seoul. A quadrilingual strategist who speaks Korean, Japanese, Chinese, and English, Park bridges the gap between Silicon Valley capital and Asia's most dynamic crypto ecosystems. His career spans traditional finance at Nomura, product at NAVER, co-founding OnePlanet (a Polygon-based NFT marketplace backed by Hashed and Animoca Brands), leading APAC business development at Polygon Labs, and serving as APAC Lead at Monad Foundation before joining a16z to anchor its Korea, Singapore, and Japan expansion.