seoul-startup
(10)
Tony Park
Tony Park is the co-founder and CEO of Stipop (YC S21), a sticker and character-content platform he launched in 2017 with his boarding-school roommate Daniel Cho. What began as a consumer sticker store in Seoul grew into a global API and SDK that lets any app add stickers with a single line of code, reaching hundreds of partners including Google, Microsoft Teams, Canva and Adobe, and generating over 200 million sticker views a month. Splitting time between Seoul and Santa Monica, Park was part of the first Korean team through Snap's Yellow accelerator before joining Y Combinator, and he has since steered Stipop toward helping independent character creators earn from their work.
Quota Lab, Inc.
Quota Lab, Inc. is a Seoul-based fintech company behind QuotaBook, a cloud equity-management platform that digitizes cap tables, stock options, RSUs and fund reporting for startups and investors. Founded in 2019 by former venture capitalists and graduated from Y Combinator's Winter 2021 batch, it has become the default equity-management infrastructure for a large share of Korean startups and VC funds, and is often described as the 'Carta of Asia.'
H2O Hospitality, Ltd.
H2O Hospitality is a Seoul-founded hospitality technology company that digitizes hotel operations end to end - from booking and mobile check-in to revenue and facility management. Its flagship platform, H2O Flow, connects reservation, property, revenue and facility systems into one workflow, and was the first service in Asia to achieve a validated integration with Oracle's OPERA PMS. Founded in 2015 by Cornell-trained, Forbes 30 Under 30 CEO John (Woong Hee) Lee, the company manages roughly 210,000 room units across seven countries and has raised about $48.5M, including a $30M Series C led by Kakao Investment and Korea Development Bank in 2021.
Colavo Ground
Colavo Ground is a Seoul-founded software company behind ColavoSalon, a free mobile-first CRM and booking platform for independent beauty professionals and salons. It bundles online booking, an appointment calendar, automated multi-channel reminders, loyalty and package tools, staff commissions and sales analytics into one app, aiming to cut no-shows and improve client retention. Colavo says it is used by well over 100,000 beauty pros across dozens of countries, and has raised roughly $3.77M, with a Series A round in 2021.
Apollon
Apollon is a Korean-American medtech company building MOGLU, a needle-free continuous glucose monitor that reads blood sugar through the skin using Raman spectroscopy instead of a subcutaneous filament. Founded in Seoul in 2021 by Aram Hong and researchers tied to MIT and Asan Medical Center, the company is developing a compact wearable that reported accuracy comparable to leading CGMs in early MIT clinical testing, has been granted FDA Breakthrough Device designation, and won a 2025 CES Innovation Award.
Jen Rhi
Jen Rhi is the founder and CEO of NXN Labs, a San Francisco and Seoul based AI company building an operating system for fashion and commerce imagery. A Stanford computer science graduate and former McKinsey and SoftBank Ventures alum, she left the investor side of the table to attack a problem she kept seeing in brands: creative ideas were cheap, but the production bandwidth to shoot models, garments and campaigns at scale was the real bottleneck. NXN Labs answers that with proprietary multimodal diffusion models that generate photorealistic on-model imagery, video and virtual try-ons without a physical shoot. Two months after founding, the company was backed by Naver D2SF, KB Investment and Smilegate; by 2026 it had landed European luxury clients and a spot on the NRF Innovators' Showcase Top 50.
AB180 - 에이비일팔공
AB180 is a Seoul-based marketing technology company building an AI stack for full-funnel app and game growth. Its flagship product, Airbridge, is a people-based mobile measurement and attribution platform (MMP) that connects ad spend to real revenue across web, app, PC and CTV, with AI-driven predictive LTV, fraud protection and deep linking. Founded in 2015, AB180 serves 600+ apps and games in more than 30 countries.
z-emotion
z-emotion is a Seoul-based fashion-tech company building 3D garment simulation software that lets designers create true-to-life digital clothing in seconds. Its flagship CAD tool, z-weave, plus plugins for Autodesk Maya and Unreal Engine, a cloud asset library, and AI-driven virtual try-on, help fashion, gaming, and e-commerce companies replace physical samples with photorealistic 3D garments. Founded by former AMD graphics researcher Dongsoo Han, the company pairs game-grade simulation with apparel workflows to push the fashion industry toward digital production.
Yeongseon Park
Yeongseon Park is the founder and CEO of ATAD Corp., a Seoul-based company building an AI-powered multi-cloud operating platform called ODiiN and a multi-LLM security gateway called Heiimdahl. ATAD's pitch is blunt: most teams run too many clouds and understand none of them. Park's products promise to operate AWS, Azure, and GCP from a single panel, claim up to 80% cost savings, and wrap it all in decentralized, zero-trust security. The company has raised about $3.36M, closed a Series A, and openly targets a Nasdaq listing by 2027.
Yongjoon Choe
Yongjoon Choe is the founder and CEO of lululab, the Seoul-based AI skincare company that spun out of Samsung's C-Lab in 2017. He turned a genome-sequencing detour at Harvard into Lumini, a system that reads ten-plus skin conditions from a single face photo in about ten seconds and recommends products to match. Under Choe, lululab has won CES Innovation Awards four years running and built its diagnostics on a deep-learning model trained on millions of skin-data points.