Top 50 Angel Investors in South Korea in February 2025

Venture Capitalist, investor and former Enterpreneur. Founder x5, profitable bootstraps, 3 exits; investor x30+ in Israel, Silicon Valley and Korea; passion for: cyber security, building scalable B2B companies

Daniel Shin is a renowned entrepreneur and investor, with extensive expertise and deep relationships in e-commerce. Daniel Shin is the Founder and CEO of PortOne Global, a leading payment company in Asia and beyond. The company's mission is to empower digital commerce partners across the Asian region. Through PortOne Global, Daniel Shinassists in the growth and development of partner companies and facilitates expansion.Previously, Daniel founded and was CEO of TicketMonster, Korea's leading e-commerce platform with $3.5Bin GMV. He is also a Co-Founder and board member of Fast Track Asia, a company-builder that established and sold multiple businesses including Fast Five (office sharing platform) and FoodFly (food delivery, acquired by Yogiyo).Daniel holds a B.Sc. in Economics from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

S Cubic Angels

Taekkyung Lee is the Founder , CEO and Representative Partner of Mashup Ventures. He previously worked at Primer Season2 as a Founding Partner. Taekkyung Lee attended Yonsei University.

Douglas Guen is the CEO and Founder of Primer. He previously worked at INICIS as a Founder and CEO. Douglas Guen attended Kyungpook National University.

Jay Eum is the Co-Founder & Managing Partner of GFT Ventures.

GI Equity (Private Investment Fund)

Naval Ravikant is the CEO and a co-founder of AngelList. He previously co-founded Epinions (which went public as part of Shopping.com) and Vast.com. He is an active Angel investor, and have invested in dozens of companies, including Twitter, Uber, Yammer, Stack Overflow and Wanelo.

Baedal Minjok was created in 2010 by founder Kim Bong-jin.

Lee Seung Ho

Pietro Dova was Corporate Controller and Finance Director at Google from 2001 to 2007. He was partly responsible for the Google IPO and roadshow, and directed Google’s operational and transactional accounting responsibilities worldwide. Immediately prior to joining Google, Pietro was CFO of Employeeservice.com. From 1996 to 1999, Pietrowas VP Finance of Quote.com, an early online pioneer providing financial news and stock information to active investors. Pietro began his career in technology in 1988 at Oracle Corporation and held various executive finance positions through 1992. From 1993 to 1996, Pietro headed Fulcrum Technologies’ European finance operations based in Paris, France. Pietro received his undergraduate degree in Civil Engineering from Imperial College, London and his Masters in Management from M.I.T.’s Sloan School of Management.

Shin Hyun Sung

Young Song joined NComputing as Founder and CEO in 2003.Mr. Song brings over 20 years of technology vision and entrepreneurial leadership with a focus on products that deliver life-enhancing value to education, business and consumers. He has founded and operated several start-up ventures with an inherent talent and track record for turning ideasinto viable products and sustainable businesses. He is also active angel investor through his own investment vehicle, Booga Ventures and Big Basin Capital as a venture partner. He founded and currently is Chief Executive Officer of NComputing group. Prior to co-founding NComputing, Mr. Song was also the founder and CEO of DoubleSight Displays, a company that delivered affordable and cost-effective dual displays to businesses and consumers and successfully acquired by Erae Inc, TV and Monitor company in South Korea. In addition, Mr. Song co-founded and was vice president of product marketing for eMachines, a pioneer in bringing affordable computing to consumers. eMachines went NASDAQ in 3 years and acquired by Gateway Computer. He began his career as marketing director for both TriGem America Corporation and TriGem Computer, Inc.Mr. Song holds a Bachelor of Science in Electronics Engineering from Yonsei University in Seoul, Korea. He is also an active volunteer for several non-profit organizations in the San Francisco Bay Area and lives in Palo Alto with his family.

Jung-hee Ryu is the Partner and CEO of FuturePlay. He previously worked at FoundationX as a Partner. Jung-hee Ryu attended the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology.

Sisun Lee is CEO at 82 Labs.

Jong-Il Yoon - Venture Partner @ BonAngels Venture Partners

Seojoon Kim (서준 김) is a co-founder and vice president of KnowRe, an education technology company that develops digital learning platforms.Kim’s previous career portfolio includes his time as an intern at Sun Microsystem; intern at Olaworks; manager at ½ project; and project manager at Mozzet. He was also the co-founder of edueyes. Aftergraduating from Seoul Science High School, Kim went on to obtain a bachelor’s degree in computer systems engineering from Pohang University of Science and Technology.

Han Ki-yong is an individual investor.

Richard Seongho Choi

Sung Bum-Hong - Founder and Executive Director @ Hugel Control

Yun-seong Hwang is a Vice President of Hyundai Motor Company.

Alex Shin

Edith is a venture capitalist, technology executive, and creator of the China Internet Report, and Silicon News.Edith is a General Partner at Race Capital - an early-stage Silicon Valley venture capital fund. A few sectors we are particularly interested in are infrastructure, fintech, and deep tech verticals. She has invested in over 50 startupsincluding Agora.io (Nasdaq: API), Lightyear/Stellar (valued at $1.2B), Silk Labs (acquired by Apple), Chirp (acquired by Apple), Fleksy (acquired by Pinterest), Human (acquired by Mapbox), Solana, Oasis Labs, Hooked, DayDayCook, AISense, and many more.Prior to Race Capital, Edith was a partner at 500 Startups, the world's most active early-stage fund and incubator invested in Twilio, Credit Karma, Grab, and 2000 more companies. Before 500, Edith was the general manager at Dolphin Browser, a Sequoia-backed mobile browser with over 150 million installs worldwide. Edith also worked with many Fortune 500 companies such as Siebel, AMS, AT&T Wireless, and Autodesk.She frequently speaks on China and Silicon Valley technology and the investment landscape. She is also a frequent guest lecturer at Berkeley and Stanford and a commentator on BBC, CNBC, Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, SCMP, Techcrunch, etc.Edith attended Harvard Business School, Stanford University, the University of California, Berkeley, and Purdue University.

Animoca Brands, ranked in the Financial Times list of High Growth Companies Asia-Pacific 2021, is a leader in digital entertainment, blockchain, and gamification. Animoca Brands develops and publishes a broad portfolio of products including the REVV token and SAND token; original games including The Sandbox, Crazy Kings, and Crazy Defense Heroes;and products utilizing popular intellectual properties including Formula 1®, Marvel, WWE, Power Rangers, MotoGP™, and Doraemon. Animoca Brands’ portfolio of blockchain investments and partnerships includes Sky Mavis (Axie Infinity), Dapper Labs (CryptoKitties and NBA Top Shot), OpenSea, Harmony, Bitski, and Alien Worlds. Its subsidiaries include The Sandbox, Quidd, Gamee, nWay, Pixowl, and Lympo.

Matthew Papakipos

Martin Randel - Co-Founder, Board Member and Owner @ Vitamin Well

Seo Jae-young is the managing director of NH Investment & Securities.

Sunghwan Choi

David was hired at Google in 2000 as one of the first 200 employees, and was the first executive to lead their international BD, sales, and operations. He launched Google’s first international ads and founded their offices in Asia, Europe and Latam. He hired the first intl. mgmt. teams, and established Google’s overseas business. After Google,David co-founded XG Ventures, a Google alumni fund and was Co-founding Partner of SK Telecom Ventures, a $100M corp. VC fund based in Silicon Valley. His personal and VC investments include over 50 companies with 20+ acquisitions such as Tapulous (acq. by Disney), Posterous (acq. by Twitter), Scoopler (acq. by Google), ABitLucky (acq. by Zynga), Chai Labs (acq. by Facebook), Cue (acq. by Apple), Kabam (acq. by Netmarble), Chartboost, Wish, and many others. David is an LP in Y Combinator and SV Angel. In 2015, he partnered with Michael Bay (Transformers, The Rock) at 451 Media, to lead their tech and media investments and partnerships. David later formed Open Source Studios, a Stanford Business School based advisory group with prof. and two time Oscar winner Bill Guttentag, to help founders of tech & media startups such as MasterClass and Illumix. David is also a Partner at B&C Group, a leading talent mgmt. & prod. co., connecting Korea, Hollywood and Silicon Valley. He currently invests in emerging tech & media companies through his venture capital fund SLVC.David is on the advisory boards of ASES (Stanford Entrepreneurship Society), and HPAIR (Harvard Project for Asian & Intl. Relations).BloombergBusinessweek “Google’s Real Power” flic.kr/p/7FVJgr The Hollywood Reporter: https://bit.ly/2UEQAujDecoding Silicon Valley: goo.gl/ZFAefzTechcrunch: goo.gl/9q9chzTop Angel Investors: goo.gl/4eqfbm“New Silicon Valley Stars of Korean Descent” goo.gl/ZwFCu6"[슈퍼리치]실리콘밸리 뉴 코리안 슈퍼리치" goo.gl/WBQOf0“스타트업 눈앞 이익만..." goo.gl/KB78mCSina News: bit.ly/2QaCqAc

Songyee Yoon

Edward Christopher Sheeran, MBE is an English singer, songwriter, guitarist, record producer, and actor. He attended the Academy of Contemporary Music in Guildford as an undergraduate from the age of 18 in 2009. In early 2011, Sheeran independently released the extended play, No. 5 Collaborations Project.

Michael Maxwell Carter is CEO at Weeby.co.

Bae Yong-joon (born August 29, 1972) is a South Korean actor and businessman.

Korea University, BSc KAIST, MSc U. of Maryland, Entrepreneurship A.T Kearney Research Assistant LOTTE HQ In-house-consultant SK planet RecoPick Biz. Development

Sebastien Borget is the Co-founder and COO of Pixowl. Passionate for blockchain technology, gaming and education, he is a very active speaker and evangelist who spent the past 8 years focused exclusively on mobile gaming, creating successful games that were downloaded millions of times.

Kelvin Dongho Kim is a founding CEO of Korea Credit Data(KCD), which provides essential services for merchants in Korea including business management, customer analysis, POS and payment services as well as marketplace platform. KCD and its five subsidiaries currently serve almost all of the two million merchants that accept credit cards payment inKorea.Kelvin is well known in the start-up scene as a serial entrepreneur with his first success case being Opensurvey, a consumer data company that leverages mobile application.

Jesse is a GP at Flybridge Capital and a co-founder of The Community Fund. His expertise lies in business development, community building, product, and fundraising. Jesse was on the founding team of WeWork and a part of the global WeWork community. He attended Drexel University.

Sujay is the 26-year old CEO and Co-Founder of Frontier Car Group (FCG), a Berlin-based, emerging markets-focused automotive marketplace. Sujay co-founded the business at the age of 23. FCG has now raised $575M+ from Naspers, Balderton, and TPG Growth. Prior, Sujay was a partner at Kingsway Capital, a London-based emerging-markets focused fund.Sujay was on the founding team of Hired.com (a talent marketplace) as its COO, which now operates in Australia, Europe, and the US. Before Hired, Sujay entered Harvard at age 15, before leaving with a Thiel Fellowship. Sujay was named one of Forbes’ 30 under 30 and one of Goldman Sachs’ top 100 intriguing entrepreneurs in 2016 and 2018.

Victor Wang is a technology-focused VC investor interested in helping extremely brilliant, ambitious, relentless founders build category-defining companies. Earlier in his career, Victor conducted genomic research at Stanford University and earned a B.A. in Molecular & Cell Biology with a Minor in Nutritional Sciences from UC Berkeley.

Tarun Chitra is Co-Founder and CEO of Gauntlet, a simulation platform for crypto networks to help developers understand how decisions about security, governance, and consensus mechanisms are likely to affect network activity and asset value. His research in DeFi includes the first peer-reviewed papers proving the economic security properties ofUniswap and Compound. He previously worked in high frequency trading for Vatic Labs and was a scientific programmer at D. E. Shaw Research.

Bashar Hamood is a result oriented professional with versatile experience across diverse organizational domains. He is well versed in the development of marketing strategies, branding, direct marketing, new products/brands launches, analysis, reporting, and positioning.He is an entrepreneur and self-starter with expansive experience in brandawareness and development, community outreach.Bashar is a versatile business manager with proven competencies in optimizing team dynamics uniting diverse agenda to common goal and harnessing strategic and operational drivers to deliver results.He has a strong analytical mind with rigorous study for each case and the output of each variation for each parameter.Bashar loves to take risk and new challenges.

Sam Kazemian is the Founder of Frax Finance.

Michael founded users. Michael and the team successfully raised $30M in venture capital investment from investors such as Brentwood, Sprout, Intel Capital, Citigroup Venture Capital, and Transcosmos Corporation. In February of 2000, mySimon was successfully acquired by CNET for $700M.Prior to mySimon.com, Michael held positions at Xerox Corp., Intergraph Corporation, TeleVideo, Inc., Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., and Jazz Multimedia, Inc. Michael has a BS degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from UC Berkeley, MS degree in Computer Science from Columbia University and MBA degree from the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley. He has served on the advisory board of the Stanford Institute of Economic Policy Research (SIEPR) at Stanford University. Michael holds a third degree black belt in Tae Kwon Do.

Jimmy Iovine, the Chairman of Universal Music Group’s Interscope Geffen A&M Records unit, is regarded as both a legendary figure in the music industry as well as a forward-thinking visionary.The Brooklyn-born Iovine’s four-decade career began when he was just out of his teens. As a recording engineer, he found himself in the studio withJohn Lennon and Bruce Springsteen (Born To Run, Darkness On The Edge Of Town) before setting his sights on being a producer. Building on what he’d learned from the masters, he helped Patti Smith (Easter), Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers (Damn The Torpedoes), and U2 (Rattle & Hum) -- all current Rock and Roll Hall of Famers -- achieve career breakthroughs. He also produced Stevie Nicks first solo album (Bella Donna) as well as albums for Dire Straits (Making Movies) and The Pretenders (Get Close).Interscope, the record label that Iovine co-founded in 1990, has come to be widely regarded as the home of music’s most consistently fearless, intriguing, and popular artists, including Dr. Dre, Nine Inch Nails, U2, Mary J. Blige, No Doubt, Marilyn Manson, The Black Eyed Peas, Eminem, 50 Cent, and Lady Gaga. Powered by Iovine’s peerless rapport with musicians, new buzzed-about stars like Azealia Banks, Ellie Goulding, Kendrick Lamar, and Lana Del Rey, are ensuring that that reputation endures.With the rise of hip-hop, alternative culture, and technology, Iovine didn’t rest on his legacy but instead used his credibility and integrity to transform Interscope into a multi-media powerhouse that puts artists and ideas first. “The way I produce records now is I support record producers,” Iovine has said.Iovine co-produced the hit Eminem movie 8 Mile directed by Curtis Hanson and executive produced the critically acclaimed LeBron James documentary More Than A Game.In 2006, Iovine and hip-hop pioneer/producer Dr. Dre co-founded Beats By Dr. Dre, a high-performance headphone and sound transmission company intent on recapturing the fidelity of the studio. “Dre’s and my mission for Beats was to introduce premium audio to a generation that had never experienced the emotion of music as intended by the artists because of substandard ear buds and PCs,” says Iovine.Thanks to the sleekly designed headphones, as well as expansion into smart phones and car audio systems, Beats By Dr. Dre has been widely successful, securing the #1 spot in the billion+ dollar premium headphones industry. Iovine is now expanding the Beats Brand and reputation into the digital music space with Beats Music—the first streaming music service delivering contextually and culturally relevant playlists, personalized for each user, by real music experts. In many ways, Beats Music is Iovine’s latest “supergroup” with former Topspin exec Ian Rogers and Nine Inch Nails front man Trent Reznor will work alongside Beats Electronics President Luke Wood to create the next chapter of the music business and bring streaming music to the masses.For the last two years, Iovine has found a new outlet for his hard-earned wisdom. Most Americans know him as the outspoken and frank mentor who shares his insight and expertise with contestants on Fox’s ratings blockbuster American Idol. Under Iovine’s watchful eye, Idol’s standout performers now release their music through Interscope, whose A&R and marketing strategies have led to breakout careers for Scotty McCreery and Phillip Phillips.

Tim Draper is the Founder of Draper Associates. He was a Member of the Advisory Board at Mode Media. He attended Harvard Business School.

Paul Wachter has served as a member of our board of directors since August 2015. Since 1997, Wachter has been the founder and CEO of financial and asset management advisory firm Main Street Advisors in Los Angeles. Prior to forming Main Street Advisors, from 1993 to 1997, Wachter was Managing Director of Schroder & Co. Incorporated, aninvestment banking and asset management company. He has also served on the board of directors of Time Warner Inc., a publicly-traded media company, since 2010 and the board of directors of Avalanche Biotechnologies, Inc., a publicly-traded biopharmaceutical company, since 2014. Wachter has served as a Regent on the University of California Board of Regents since 2004. Wachter brings financial expertise and general business experience to our board of directors and his experience as a director of public companies provides our board of directors with valuable insights to assist in achieving our goals.

Boon Hwee is the founding partner of Credence and Chairman of the investment committee. Concurrently, Boon Hwee is a member of Agilent Technologies Inc, Chairman of AAC Technologies, Yeo Hiap Seng Limited, and Sunningdale Tech Limited.Boon Hwee began his career in 1977 at Hewlett Packard ("HP") and rose to become its Managing Directorin Singapore, a position he held from 1985 to 1990. Boon Hwee's other previous positions include:Chairman of Singapore Telecom Group ("SingTel") and its predecessor organisations for 17 yearsChairman of Singapore Airlines Limited ("SIA") for 4 yearsChairman of Development Bank of Singapore ("DBS") for 4 yearsDirector on the Board of Temasek Holdings Private Limited for 15 years (Boon Hwee also served as a member of the Executive Committee from January 1997 to September 2010)Chairman of the Wuthelam Group for 10 yearsBoon Hwee was named the Outstanding Manager of the Year in 1991 by Business Times and DHL Worldwide. He was conferred The International Herald Tribune Visionary and Leader Honour in January 2003.Boon Hwee contributes actively to non-profit organisations, and is the current Chairman of the Board of Trustees of Nanyang Technological University and a Director of the Hewlett Foundation in the United States.Boon Hwee obtained his Bachelor's Degree (First Class Honours) in Mechanical Engineering from the Imperial College of Science and Technology, University of London in 1972 and his MBA (Distinction) from the Harvard Business School in 1976.

Michael Egorov is the Founder of Curve DAO Token. He previously worked at NuCypher as a CTO. Michael Egorov attended Swinburne University of Technology.

McKelvey grew up in a "five-mother collective" in Eugene, Oregon.[2] His family started and ran a weekly newspaper called the Eugene Weekly.[3]In a January 2020 interview with Fortune, McKelvey called himself "a wild kid" on the high school basketball court. He said that he found a sense of accountability from his coach, whowas a strict disciplinarian. He said of Coach Stepp, "I didn’t grow up with my father, so I never had someone telling me to keep in line

Kiha Lee