
He began as a mobile-game programmer, learned the shoe trade inside E-Land’s European operation, and spent six months hearing no from Italian factories. The business that followed runs on an unlikely pairing: old-world craft and the restless logic of software.

Sophie Soowon Eom is the co-founder and CEO of Adriel, an AI-powered marketing intelligence and ad-reporting platform used by hundreds of brands and agencies across more than 20 countries. A HEC Paris finance grad turned two-time AI founder, she first built Solidware, a machine-learning credit-scoring startup that landed her on the 2017 Forbes Asia 30 Under 30 list, then pivoted to fixing the chaos of cross-channel ad data. She has sat alongside Melinda Gates and Jack Ma on the UN Secretary-General's High-Level Panel on Digital Cooperation and served on South Korea's Presidential Committee on the 4th Industrial Revolution.