seoul
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Biodance made the mask worth waiting for
A Korean skincare company found its opening in an unusually slow product: a mask worn for hours. The harder trick was teaching customers why they should wait.
RSQUARE found the gap between buildings
The Seoul company built its commercial property business by collecting what the internet missed. Now it sells both the expertise to close a deal and the data to question one.
Blockwave Labs and the business of making money move
First came wallets, then loyalty points, then trading vaults. Now the Seoul builder is bringing its blockchain experience to the less glamorous business of payments and settlement.
The $299 Seoul Checkup: How Himedi Turned Healthcare Friction Into a Concierge Business
A routine physical in America can feel like an appetizer. Himedi sells the Korean alternative - dozens of tests in one morning - then handles the translation, booking and nerves around it.
The Accelerator That Bets on Atoms, Not Apps
Everyone wanted to fund the next app. N15 built a workshop for the people who make things you can hold - and turned Korea's biggest electronics market into a startup factory.
AYC Fund
AYC Fund is an AI-native crypto hedge fund out of Y Combinator's W22 batch, founded in 2021 by MJ Kim in Seoul. It builds systematic, rules-based trading engines for digital-asset markets and now runs a private, invite-only program for qualified clients - high-net-worth individuals, family offices, and advisors - where capital stays in the client's own exchange account and the fund trades through read-and-trade API access rather than taking custody.
Stipop
Stipop is a sticker infrastructure company that lets any app add a searchable library of 150,000+ stickers with a single line of code, through its API and SDK. Founded in Seoul by roommates-turned-cofounders Tony Park and Daniel Cho, it grew a marketplace of thousands of global artists, powered sticker features for Google, Microsoft Teams, Canva and Adobe, and joined Snap's Yellow accelerator and Y Combinator (S21). It has since expanded toward monetization tools for character-IP creators and AI chat products.
YC Corporation
YC Corporation is a Seoul-based digital transformation company that helps small and mid-sized Korean manufacturers go digital. As an official Autodesk partner, it supplies and consults on CAD/CAM/PLM software (Fusion 360, AutoCAD, Inventor, PowerMill), builds its own YC Smart Line MES, and sells the hardware - CNC routers, laser markers, 3D printers and IoT sensors - to run it. Founded in 2022 and bootstrapped, the company reached roughly 7 billion won in revenue by mid-2024 by focusing on shops that earlier smart-factory programs overlooked.
Illimis Therapeutics
Illimis Therapeutics is a Seoul-based biotechnology company developing protein-based medicines for central nervous system and immune diseases. Its proprietary GAIA (Gas6-mediated Anti-Inflammatory Adaptor) platform builds bispecific fusion proteins that engage the body's TAM receptors to clear misfolded proteins such as amyloid-beta through phagocytosis without triggering the inflammation and ARIA side effects associated with existing antibody drugs. Founded in 2021, the company raised a $42 million Series B in July 2025 and is advancing a lead Alzheimer's candidate, ILM01, toward an IND by the end of 2027.
Redrob
Redrob is an AI company building large language models and go-to-market tools for sales, recruitment, and prospecting. Its platform combines a 700M+ contact data pool, verified emails, and real-time buying signals to help B2B teams find prospects, automate outreach, and screen talent. Founded by former international lawyer Felix Kim, Redrob positions itself as an affordable, enterprise-grade AI stack for emerging markets and cost-conscious companies, and aims to become one of the world's most-used LLM platforms by 2028.
ATAD Corp.
ATAD Corp. is a Seoul-based technology company building an AI-driven multi-cloud operating platform that helps teams run AWS, Azure, and GCP environments from one place. Its flagship product, ODiiN, uses AI to forecast and self-heal infrastructure problems, claiming up to 80% cost savings and large productivity gains. Founded in 2023 by cloud and cybersecurity specialists, ATAD pairs cloud automation with a security stack built on AI, multi-factor authentication, and zero-knowledge proofs, and also runs Heiimdahl (a multi-LLM monitoring gateway) and Kraton (a blockchain-based decentralized VPN). The company has raised about $3.36M and holds a growing portfolio of patents in multi-cloud integration and secure data distribution.
Avelos Therapeutics
Avelos Therapeutics is a Seoul-based clinical-stage oncology biotech founded in 2021 that designs small-molecule drugs for 'undruggable' cancer targets using synthetic lethality, DNA damage response (DDR), and cell-cycle biology. Its lead program, AD1208, is a first-in-class oral MASTL kinase inhibitor now in a Phase 1/2a solid-tumor trial. Backed by KRW 30 billion (~$21.7M) across seed, Series A, and a 2024 Series B, the roughly nine-person team is building a biomarker-driven pipeline of four anti-cancer candidates aimed at a future KOSDAQ listing.
Spoqa
Spoqa is a Seoul-based software company that builds tools for the people who run shops and restaurants. It first became known for Dodo Point, a tablet-based loyalty service that replaced paper stamp cards across tens of thousands of Korean stores and signed up tens of millions of customers with nothing more than a phone number. After selling Dodo Point to Yanolja in 2022, Spoqa rebuilt around Kitchenboard (formerly Dodo Cart), a B2B platform that helps restaurant owners order, manage, and pay for their ingredients - matching them with vendors and using AI to turn messy supplier chats into structured orders. Along the way Spoqa also released Spoqa Han Sans, a free, open-source Korean typeface used widely across the Korean web.