seoul-startup
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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.
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.
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.