korea-startup
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Sangmin Park
Sangmin Park is the CEO of 현대엠시스템즈(주) (Hyundai M Systems), a Suwon-based Korean company that builds intelligent safety systems for construction equipment. Founded in 2003 and now part of the Hyundai Mirae-ro Group, the company combines cameras, 24GHz radar and controllers into products like AVM-RDS (Around View Monitor with Rear Detection System) that reduce blind spots and prevent accidents on excavators, wheel loaders and forklifts. Under Park, the company became a tier-1 supplier to Volvo Construction Equipment and Hyundai (HD) Construction Equipment, raised a 5 billion won Series B in July 2024, and set its sights on becoming the world leader in construction-equipment safety.
Yu-Sung Chang
Yu-Sung Chang is the co-founder, CEO and CTO of Vivity AI, an industrial AI company building software for heavy industries like petrochemicals, shipbuilding and manufacturing. A computer scientist with a Ph.D. from Stony Brook University, he spent years at Wolfram Research working on Mathematica's graphics and geometry systems before moving into e-commerce technology leadership as CTO of Korea's SSG.COM and co-founding the healthcare AI startup Huma.AI. In 2022 he founded Vivity AI, which raised roughly $8.4M in a round backed by Hanwha Systems, to close the gap between the physical and digital worlds on the factory floor.
Ilsu Park
Ilsu Park is the co-founder and CEO of Mars Auto, a Seoul-based startup building camera-based, map-free self-driving software for heavy trucks. A KAIST computer science graduate and self-taught deep-learning engineer, he started with a hobby project that used a driving-game simulator to train a neural network, then turned that idea into a company that runs paid autonomous freight in Korea and the United States. Mars Auto takes a Tesla-style vision-first approach, skipping LiDAR and HD maps to cut the cost of automating a Class 8 truck to roughly $7,000 per unit. Park has raised about $12 million, graduated from Y Combinator, and made the Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia list. He is targeting fully driverless long-haul freight by 2028.
Grant Sohn
Grant Sohn is the co-founder and co-CEO of Spoqa, the Seoul-based company behind Dodo Point, Korea's #1 offline rewards service, which grew past 20 million users and 10,000+ merchant partners. A Stanford economics graduate and former McKinsey analyst, he left consulting in the United States to build loyalty software for brick-and-mortar shops in South Korea. In 2018 he co-founded Carry Protocol, a blockchain venture aiming to give shoppers control of their own transaction data, and after selling Dodo Point to Yanolja in 2022, he refocused Spoqa on restaurants with Kitchenboard.
Hyesung Kim
Hyesung Kim is the founder and CEO of Mineis, the Seoul company behind Charan, a full-service fashion recommerce platform that collects, inspects, cleans, photographs, prices, sells, and ships used clothing on the seller's behalf. A University of Chicago economics grad who started his first ad-tech company as an undergrad and later worked as a venture investor, Kim built Charan to remove the friction that keeps closets full of unworn clothes. The platform passed 400,000 users within a year of its 2023 launch, was named to Forbes Asia's 100 to Watch in 2024, and raised a 16.8 billion won Series B in 2025, bringing total funding to 32.2 billion won.