As Korea faces the growing challenge of caring for an aging society, one start-up hopes to help reduce the social costs by treating and diagnosing mental disorders without the use of drugs.Ybrain, a Seoul-based medical technology start-up, aims to create wearable devices that help doctors and patients treat mental diseases in their early stages, and even prevent them. Its ultimate goal is a medical device tackling the most common form of dementia ― Alzheimer’s disease, which it views as the most

Technology Aug. 26, 2015

Korean hardware start-up WayWearable is aiming to take K-beauty to the world with a smart skin care device that helps women in their daily life.And it has found sufficient reason to believe it can: Its debut product, WAY, used crowdfunding on global platform Indiegogo in May and June to raise over $120,000 from fans in 44 countries ― 243 percent of what it asked for, before the product even hit mass production. “K-beauty is hot nowadays. We would like to create a new movement blending K-beauty a

Technology Aug. 20, 2015

With KakaoTalk dominating Korea’s mobile messenger market, Between has been cementing its foothold in the couples messenger niche. Now with half its users coming from abroad, the mobile app is braving ground in Southeast Asia.“We’re trying to expand our product to the global market,” Jake Park, CEO of the app’s developer VCNC, told The Korea Herald in an interview Friday. “Very fortunately we are not directly competing with big messaging apps … so we can get into the niche market (and) bring a v

Technology Aug. 12, 2015

Korea’s start-up community breathed a collective sigh of relief last month when the government approved the long-awaited crowdfunding act, two years after it was first proposed in June 2013.Aimed at opening funding channels for start-ups, the Financial Investment Services and Capital Markets Act paves the way for equity-based crowdfunding ― a type of fund-raising method that lets individuals invest up to 2 million won ($1,700) in a single start-up, and 5 million won collectively over the year, t

Technology Aug. 10, 2015

Harvard dropout Kim Bom’s daily deals start-up Coupang made Korean tech start-up history in June when it fetched $1 billion from SoftBank in the country’s largest-ever Internet investment.Coupang is Korea’s prized unicorn, and perhaps SoftBank’s as well: After hooking bargain hunters with Groupon-type daily discount promotions and beating out its local rivals as the go-to source for cheap deals, the Seoul-headquartered start-up transformed itself into an e-retailer, raking in over 200 billion wo

Technology Aug. 5, 2015

KPOP UNITED CEO Richard Choo is glad to see that it’s finally cool to be Korean in the world.Hallyu hits like Psy, Big Bang, Girls’ Generation and Wonder Girls, paired with the stylish haute couture image being exported, have put Korea on the “relevancy map,” and there is a high global demand for the country’s cultural contents, he said.But with the industry so new on the global scene and fans hailing from such disparate ends from Turkey and Brazil to Indonesia and Ivory Coast, promoters and eve

Technology July 29, 2015

This is the seventh and final article in a series on foreigners working in Korea’s technology start-up ecosystem. ― Ed.PinStory, a food recommendation start-up in Seoul, is the poster image of diversity: A Korean ex-banker and a Spanish ex-restaurateur and developer spotted a shortage of restaurant information in English and joined together last year to create a quality-driven directory of Seoul’s best eateries for a foreign audience. PinStory CEO Universe Shin (left, back row) poses with the te

July 27, 2015

Korea’s modern start-ups are taking a marked turn from their predecessors. Instead of basking in local success, they are getting smarter and faster about going global, according to Korean-American venture capitalist Bernard Moon.Bernard Moon, founding partner of SparkLabs’ accelerator and global venture fund, poses at the firm’s Seoul office. Park Hyun-koo/The Korea HeraldThat is why he and two founding partners placed their bets on Seoul’s sprouting start-up scene in 2012, and set up SparkLabs,

Technology July 22, 2015

Asia is currently the world’s fastest-growing region, and foreigners are beginning to spot opportunities to found their start-ups in Asian countries.“What I’m seeing is a real increase in entrepreneurship and a real increase in mobility, especially among younger entrepreneurs,” said Peter Wall, cofounder of Hubud, a coworking space in Bali, Indonesia.However, it is not easy to set up a foreign start-up across the region. While some hubs, like Singapore, are keener to globalize and attract foreig

Technology July 20, 2015

Tim Chae, venture partner of 500 Kimchi, speaks during an interview with The Korea Herald at the fund's office in Google's Campus Seoul in southern Seoul last week. Park Hyun-koo/The Korea Herald    Silicon Valley entrepreneur Tim Chae is betting -- $15 million, to be precise -- that in the next 3-5 years, Korea will be the Silicon Valley of Asia. And he says so because it’s the only country in the continent that meets the tech hub trifecta of being rich, relevant and cool.　　A decade after immig

Business July 15, 2015

Start-up Seoul is a series featuring players in Korea’s emerging tech start-up scene. This is the second installment. ― Ed.Disease diagnosis markets around the world are broken, claims one new local start-up that aims to equalize health care globally, starting with a drop of blood.On top of high costs and several days’ lag to get results from a hospital for a blood test, the markets to diagnose different diseases like diabetes and high cholesterol are monopolized and segmented, causing a massive

Technology July 8, 2015

As South Korea strives to become the next Asian tech hub in its “creative economy” drive, public and private investments into the start-up economy are at their height. The government has earmarked 180 trillion won ($166 billion) this year to foster a start-up ecosystem, new industries and markets with growth potential, while private venture capital funding passed 1.6 trillion won last year, according to data from the Korea Venture Capital Association. But foreign entrepreneurs are struggling wit

Technology July 2, 2015

Start-up Seoul is a new series featuring players in Korea’s emerging tech start-up scene. This is the first installment. ― Ed.When Korean-American Joon Oh was making his way from Samsung salaryman to bootstrapping entrepreneur of MangoPlate ― his restaurant discovery start-up that fetched 6.7 billion won ($6 million) from U.S. investor Qualcomm Ventures last week ― he realized that to get connected with the start-up scene in Seoul, he either had to join several networks he didn’t mesh well with

Technology July 1, 2015

Two years ago, the barrier for foreign entrepreneurs to open a business in Korea was 100 million won high ― about $100,000. As major cities began emerging as tech hubs, the Seoul government recognized its need to catch up with the global trend as global talent sought friendlier homes. Since then, it has been opening doors for foreigners’ start-ups as part of its creative economy drive to foster the “Korean Silicon Valley” as the next Asian tech hub. The government vowed

Technology June 18, 2015

This is the third article in a series on foreigners working in Korea’s technology start-up ecosystem. Sang Youn-joo and Stephanie McDonald contributed to this report. ― Ed.Etienne Maurin hadn’t finished graduate school when Kim Min-kee sought to found a start-up with him. A whiz at programming languages like Ruby, the master’s student from France was the most trustworthy partner to help Kim develop My Memoirs, a story-sharing platform inspired by his time working with cancer patients who wanted

June 4, 2015

JobSeekr, an English- and Korean-language job hunting website in Seoul launched last year by two expats, is holding its first job fair and networking event Sunday to connect foreign entry-level job seekers with Korean start-ups.British entrepreneur Simon Chan, cofounder of parent company SeekrLab, said his team handpicked fewer than 10 startups that would make the best use of international members, such as those going global, those dealing with translation and language-related services or those

Expat Living May 27, 2015

This is the second article in a series on foreigners working in Korea’s technology start-up ecosystem. ― Ed.Tech industry pundits in Korea used to joke that this is where overseas companies would come to die. In a country once dominated by local titans like Nate and Cyworld, foreign rivals like Yahoo and Myspace struggled to connect with local Web users and eventually backed out.But the situation has flipped in the past three to five years, they say, as social media and content sharing behemoths

Technology May 21, 2015

Apora Ventures, an Amsterdam-based start-up investment firm, is kicking off its operations in Seoul next month with a program inviting global-minded Korean start-ups to immerse their business in the European innovation and technology hotspot of Berlin.The program, Accelerate Korea-Berlin, will nurture five start-ups younger than 3 years old for a four-month acceleration program starting June 1, including spending three months in the German capital, where they will have opportunities to form part

Technology May 13, 2015

This is the first article in a series on foreigners working in Korea’s technology start-up ecosystem. ― Ed.With the world’s best broadband networks, global technology giants, game-crazy smartphone users and a hefty 4 trillion won ($3.7 billion) government budget to foster the local start-up ecosystem, Korea is building itself up to be the next major Asian tech hub. But on the ground level, financial, legal, language and cultural roadblocks in Korea are still pushing many foreign tech entrepreneu

Technology May 7, 2015

The South Korean government is considering the need to remove the limit on the number of foreign workers a company can hire, a move that would ease hiring, especially for small businesses, according to a foreign business representative in Korea.French-Korean Chamber of Commerce and Industry chairman David-Pierre Jalicon said Trade, Industry and Energy Minister Yoon Sang-jick wants to remove the foreign worker quota by the end of the year. The quota requires companies to hire five Koreans full-ti

Social Affairs April 20, 2015