Yongjoon Choe

The pitch in one line

Point a phone at your face. Get a diagnosis.

Yongjoon Choe runs lululab, and lululab makes Lumini, and Lumini does something the cosmetics counter never could: it measures. Wrinkles, acne, pigmentation, redness, pores, dark circles - more than ten conditions read off a single photo in about ten seconds, then ranked, scored, and matched to product. No salesperson. No guesswork. Just a model that has looked at more faces than any dermatologist will see in a lifetime.

That is the whole trick, and it is harder than it sounds. Skin is the body's largest organ and its most public one. We stare at it every morning and treat it with hunches. Choe's contention is that hunches are a measurement failure, not a fact of life - and that a face is just data wearing a person.

The number under the hood is the headline: a deep-learning engine trained on more than five million skin-data points drawn from around the world. That is the moat. Anyone can build a beauty app. Almost nobody has the labeled faces to make one accurate.

Eight words. It is also the entire business plan.

Choe did not arrive in beauty. He wandered in. The path runs through a BSc in bioengineering at Cornell, then DNA genome-sequencing research at Harvard Medical School - the kind of resume that points toward a lab bench, not a cosmetics shelf.

But somewhere in the genome work, a mismatch nagged at him. The beauty market was exploding. The technology underneath it was stuck in the era of the mirror and the sales pitch. Here was an industry obsessed with the skin, with no objective way to read it. To a researcher who measured things for a living, that gap looked less like an annoyance and more like an opening.

The opening had a home. Inside Samsung Electronics, the C-Lab program existed to incubate exactly this kind of odd, cross-disciplinary bet. As a Creative Leader there, Choe and a core group - including future CTO Sangwook Yoo, who had built medical-image algorithms in Samsung's healthcare division - turned image processing and AI loose on the human face. The result was Lumini.

After roughly a year of incubation, the project did the rare thing: it left the nest. In 2017, lululab spun off from Samsung as an independent company, carrying the Lumini technology and a chunk of the team with it. The bet was that a side project could become an industry.

A genome researcher walked into the beauty industry and saw a data problem. The rest is product.

There is a tell in lululab's cap table. The Series B was led by Netmarble, a mobile-gaming company, not a cosmetics conglomerate. That is not an accident. Choe does not really run a beauty brand. He runs a data company that happens to point its sensors at skin.

Watch where he puts the product and the strategy comes into focus. Lumini lives as a kiosk in retail, a smart mirror at home, an SDK other companies can build on, and an app in your pocket. Different hardware, same engine. The face is the input; the skin-data platform is the asset. Sell the diagnosis and the product recommendation rides along for free.

It is a patient way to build. Choe talks about developing models "in advance of market changes" - the language of someone who would rather be early and accurate than loud. Four straight years of CES recognition suggests the judges agree the accuracy is real.