Three Korean Companies You’ve Never Heard Of (But Should)

The future of innovation is global. We discuss it here.

Photo by Robson Hatsukami Morgan on Unsplash

Everyone knows Samsung and Hyundai. But behind these global giants, a new wave of Korean companies is quietly reshaping fintech, travel, and biotech. Their stories carry lessons for entrepreneurs everywhere.

I am recently back from Korea, speaking at South Summit. Here are three startup stories that stand out.

Toss — Pods, Simplicity, and Building the Full Stack

A decade ago, sending $10 across banks in Korea required thirty-seven clicks and multiple passwords. Toss reduced it to a single swipe. They built the Venmo of the region as a first core product.

But simplicity became the wedge that pried open one of the most conservative financial systems in the world.

Today Toss is South Korea’s largest fintech, valued at over $7 billion, with more than 15 million monthly users. But the story isn’t just about scale. It’s about how the company organized itself to keep innovating.

Founder SG Lee didn’t have the linear journey of a Silicon Valley wunderkind. He started as a dentist, realized it wasn’t his path, and spent years in introspection. Before Toss, he launched eight failed startups. He’s clear-eyed about resilience: “The problem of being an entrepreneur is that a large part of success is determined by luck.”

Toss succeeded because it didn’t stop at payments. Korea’s financial ecosystem was riddled with gaps — only 9% of millennials traded online, and just 10% accessed unsecured loans digitally, versus over 50% in the US. As Lee put it: “We couldn’t understand why there was such a huge gap… That’s why Toss could not just be for money transfers.”

Instead of one product, Toss built the full stack: loans, insurance, investing, wealth management, credit scoring. More than forty services in all. That runs against the Valley’s conventional wisdom to “do one thing really well.” But in frontier markets, sometimes one thing isn’t enough.

The company also rethought how to organize for scale. Toss built internal “pods” — autonomous teams run like startups within the startup. Each pod operates like a founder-led company, with the freedom to experiment.

As Lee told me: “While it was hard to delegate, it was a leap of faith… the management team doesn’t have to control things. They just need to align and coordinate. Essentially, they are playing coach.”

That structure turned Toss from a payments app into Korea’s financial super-app. The broader lesson: start with radical simplicity, but design the organization for complexity.

Yanolja — From Motels to Global Travel SaaS

If Toss reinvented finance, Yanolja reinvented travel. Its origins are as improbable as they come. Founder Sujin Lee was orphaned, worked as a janitor in a motel, and eventually launched a website called “Motel Story” to review budget accommodation. Out of that unlikely beginning, he built Yanolja, now one of the world’s fastest-growing travel tech companies.

At first glance, Yanolja looks like a booking app. But the real engine is Yanolja Cloud, a cloud-based (SaaS) technology ecosystem that powers hotels and travel businesses around the world. In 2024, Yanolja processed $18.3 billion in transactions, up 186% year-over-year. Its enterprise solutions now serve over 1.3 million travel businesses and more than 21,000 sales channels.

Imagine combining Booking.com’s marketplace, Airbnb’s community-driven growth, and Salesforce’s cloud architecture into one company.

“At Yanolja, our goal is to make travel smarter, easier, and more connected for everyone. Through our cloud-based Travel Enablement Platform powered by AI, we are helping hotels and travel enterprises digitize operations, apply AI to real business challenges, and deliver more seamless and personalized experiences for travelers around the world,” says Yanolja Cloud CEO Jeff Kim.

Yanolja shows two lessons. First, great companies can emerge from unexpected beginnings. A “motel app” doesn’t sound like the foundation of a global travel leader — until it is. Second, consumer apps often hide much bigger infrastructure businesses beyond them. Yanolja isn’t just a travel brand; it’s becoming the operating system of global hospitality.

SoftBank Vision Fund invested $1.7 billion to back this ambition, and Yanolja has grown far beyond Asia to become a global travel technology company operating in more than 200 countries. It’s no longer just a local player. It’s a global platform shaping the future of travel.

CHA Bio — The Camel of Biotech

Not all innovation moves at app speed. CHA Bio is one of Korea’s quiet giants in biotech, specializing in stem cell research and fertility treatments. In 2023, it posted record revenues of 954 billion KRW (about $798 million). In the first half of 2025, revenues rose another 21% year-on-year.

CHA Bio’s story is one of patience. Biotech requires decades of R&D, infrastructure, and regulatory work before scaling. CHA spent years building that foundation — research centers, clinics in the US, Japan, and Korea, and a reputation that makes it a magnet for medical tourism.

CHA Bio has pioneered advances in regenerative medicine — from stem-cell–based therapies and fertility treatments to cutting-edge work in immunology and cell rejuvenation — supported by one of Asia’s most advanced private research networks.

Like other global innovators, they have built their own talent pipeline. For example, they launched CHA university.

The lesson here is different from Toss or Yanolja. Not every company can blitzscale. Some must grow like camels — slowly, durably, across long horizons. The moat isn’t speed but persistence.

Honorable Mentions

Korea’s innovation story doesn’t stop with these three. Coupang has redefined e-commerce with its “rocket delivery” model, leveraging dense cities and logistics innovation to compete with Amazon on its home turf. Lunit has emerged as a global leader in AI cancer diagnostics, proving that Korean healthtech can clear FDA approval and scale internationally. SendBird, which started in Korea and scaled in Silicon Valley, now powers chat APIs for global platforms like Reddit, PayPal, and DoorDash, showing the country’s strength in developer infrastructure. BankSalad, Toss’s fintech rival, illustrates how intense local competition forces even small players to move quickly and broaden scope. And Krafton, the gaming studio behind PUBG, demonstrates that Korean cultural IP isn’t just music or TV dramas — it’s also interactive and global.

Lessons for Entrepreneurs Everywhere

Taken together, these companies reveal a powerful set of lessons. They demonstrate the importance of a long-term outlook, a focus on building local ecosystems to succeed, and unique approaches to management and scale.

The larger point is clear: the future of innovation isn’t only in Silicon Valley. It is being written in unexpected places, solving unexpected problems, in unexpected ways.