Made in Seoul: Miracles, unicorns, and startup success stories

Few places tell a transformation story quite like South Korea. Over the course of half a century, the country transitioned from an agricultural-based economy to a major industrial powerhouse and leader in technological innovation. The period of rapid growth, dubbed the Miracle on Han River, was one of the fastest in economic history and is perhaps most evident in Seoul, a city defined by speed and constant reinvention. Today, that same spirit fuels the city’s startup community, with founders innovating and adapting to match the pace of the capital.

Strategically positioned as a gateway to APAC and beyond, Seoul offers direct access to regional and international markets, helping founders to build with international audiences in mind and operate with worldwide growth in their sights. AWS supports this ambition, connecting startups to a huge community and providing access to partners, tools, initiatives, and guidance needed to grow.

Following stops in New York and San Francisco, AWS continued its globe-trotting tour of startup hubs with a touchdown in Seoul. Here, a number of founders share their experiences of building a business in Seoul, and how they’re are harnessing AWS support to write the next chapter in the city’s story.

Growing at the speed of Seoul

Seoul counts over 2,000 startups among its business community, including 27 unicorn companies. This environment is supported by healthy investment activity; last year saw a 14% increase in new venture investment compared with 2024. The pace of growth in the sector has also been impressive, with the value of Seoul’s startup space increasing from US $40 billion to $237 billion between 2020 and 2024.

This rapid development and the speed at which the city operates was a major pull factor for a number of startups. “We wanted to grow fast, we wanted to learn about the market fast, and we wanted to expand to the global market very fast,” says Roi Nam, CEO of AB180, an AI marketing platform. “This is why we chose Seoul over other cities.” Speed, it seems, permeates throughout the city’s culture, from the startups seeking to expand their business to the customers they are hoping to serve.

“Seoul has a very strong move fast culture,” explains Dogyun Kim, Co-Founder and CEO of DALPHA, an AI platform for ecommerce. “Companies here don't like waiting too long. They want to test ideas quickly and see real results.” This mindset has influenced how he built his startup alongside Co-founder and Director, Sunbin You, both of whom were born and raised in Seoul. As such, he continues, “many companies are very open to trying new technology. This made it easier for us to work with real customers from the very beginning.”

Similarly, Jack Bang, Co-founder and COO of AI robotics firm Config, says customers can be “super demanding,” and in a city which is “very competitive, high demand, high pressure,” required the startup to match this speed, support customer needs, and prove itself “from the get go.” This is an outlook shared by Minyong Lee, Founder and CEO of CRM specialist, Grey Box. “The competition is very strong, so you have to really follow up with the customers’ needs,” he explains.

Law&Company aims not simply to keep pace with the speed of Seoul, but to anticipate the future trajectory of the sectors it serves in order to “lead the market”,” says Jaeseong Jeong, the company’s Co-founder & Deputy CEO. Jeong admits that “as technology evolves, the speed of cities and startups has accelerated to a point where predicting even the next three months is a challenge.” However, he continues, “with AWS, we can stay ahead of global trends and explore uncharted territories.”

Law&Company has been working with AWS since 2015, building its core services on AWS infrastructure and extending the partnership as the company has grown more focused on developing generative AI-specialized legal services. This includes establishing its own Legal AI Research Institute in 2019, “demonstrating our commitment to inferring the market’s direction early,” says Jeong. “This preemptive move allowed us to launch SuperLawyer, Korea’s first generative AI for law, and become the sole legal-tech firm in the government’s sovereign AI project,” he says.

AWS from day zero

Gaining access to a marketplace eager to trial the latest technologies is one benefit of launching a startup in Seoul, yet it’s not without its challenges and is a factor shaping the course of startups. “Seoul has influenced me as a founder in that it helps me have this urgency mindset,” says Lee. “You have to keep building things quickly and solve real problems.”

While a central aim of most startups, building quickly can be problematic. Teams are often small and resources limited, presenting barriers to experimenting with and deploying the very solutions needed to enable growth. AWS is helping startups overcome such barriers, providing cost-effective access to services as well as human support and business-focused guidance. For our founders, the choice of partner was therefore as natural a decision as the choice of location for building their business.

“From a startup’s perspective, AWS is the ideal partner,” says Law&Company’s Jeong. “For early-stage startups with limited resources, AWS offers a highly scalable, pay-as-you-go model that minimizes the need for dedicated infrastructure personnel while supporting rapid growth.” The company has benefitted from technical and financial support through a number of AWS programs, “which have been crucial to our growth.”

The adoption of Amazon Bedrock, which Law&Company used to build and launch its solution, is an example of this supercharged growth in action. “Even as we handle hundreds of thousands of model inferences daily, Amazon Bedrock ensures the scalability and stability of our AI services,” says Jeong. “Within just 20 months of launch, we secured 25,000 legal professionals as customers and achieved an impressive 96.7 percent first-month retention rate.” With AWS managing infrastructure and service operations, Law&Company’s team are freed up to “focus more on customer satisfaction and our services, rather than worrying about infrastructure.”

Config, meanwhile, has been working with AWS “since day zero,” says Hyungmok Son, its Co-Founder and CTO. The company specializes in AI and robotics and AWS provides the backbone of Config’s data and compute training infrastructure. Son explains, “We store large-scale data of high quality in Amazon S3, while compute workloads such as data processing, model training, and even some of the model inferences, run on a scalable GPU infrastructure provided by AWS.” This scalable and secure foundation has enabled Config to evolve “from a small-scale experiment set-up to a reliable and more structured infrastructure supporting large-scale data generation and large-scale model training.”

AB180 also picked AWS as a partner due to the scalability and reliability of services. “We wanted to deploy servers really fast, and whenever we grew we wanted the server to scale out flexibly, according to our own usage,” explains Nam. In addition, “Reliability in terms of server downtime in every possible scenario stage should be bulletproof. AWS was the number one solution that we could choose.”

The choice has proven pivotal in supporting the startup’s growth. In January, AB180 expanded its server region to Seoul and, says Nam, “AWS experts really helped us a lot in terms of planning, architecting, and shaping the new future of our server multi-region support.” As a result, “we're tracking more than 75 billion user events from 176 million mobile devices a month, which was a huge leap from a few million back in the days,” he adds.

The reliability and scalability of AWS infrastructure have also delivered tangible results for Config, enabling it to develop its expertise. “As our data sets and models grew, AWS enabled us to evolve from a small-scale experiment to a more reliable and structured infrastructure supporting high-quality, large-scale action data and the training of robotics foundation models,” says Hyungmok.

For Grey Box, results are evident from the expansion of its customer base.  “As we have evolved and as got more customers, we needed more, complex infrastructure. AWS had all of these building blocks that we needed to grow,” says Lee.

One such building block is Amazon Bedrock, which is one of a number of tools that have allowed Law & Company to launch its business and sustain growth. The startup’s mission is to make legal services more accessible, focusing on legal AI research to help lawyers work more efficiently and productively. “All of our core services are built and run on AWS infrastructure,” says Jaeseong Jeong, Co-founder and Deputy CEO of Law & Company. “Our users generate hundreds of thousands of model inferences every day and Amazon Bedrock helps us ensure both scalability and stability for our AI services.” Relying on AWS to support technical requirements and manage infrastructure and operations frees up Law & Company’s team, “to focus more on customer satisfaction and our services,” adds Jeong.

DALPHA meanwhile has realized cost efficiencies through the partnership with AWS. The company runs most of its workloads on AWS, using solutions such as Amazon ECS to manage its systems, AWS multi-account set-up to support enterprise clients, and hybrid GPU nodes, “to reduce compute costs and provide a more cost-efficient service to our customers,” says Kim.

Grey Box, a customer engagement platform, has also been building on AWS “from day one,” says Minyong Lee, its Founder and CEO. The startup deployed a number of serverless resources, which “helped us launch quickly without building infrastructure systems from scratch,” he says. As Grey Box has grown and the complexity of its messaging and data infrastructure has developed, it has relied on AWS to scale alongside it, enabling the startup to “build this complex system without building a big engineering team”: a critical requirement for any early-stage business.

International growth, local support

In addition to supporting early growth and scaling of infrastructure, AWS also offers support through a number of initiatives, such as AWS Activate, which offers founders tools, resources, and go-to-market support. “The AWS Activate program helped us a lot in the early stages,” says DALPHA’s You. “It allowed us to test many AI workloads without worrying too much about the infrastructure cost. That gave us the freedom to experiment and find the right architecture for our solutions.”

For Grey Box, the value of AWS Activate lay in gaining access to Activate Credits. As part of the program, eligible startups can apply for up to US $100,000 in credits to offset the cost of over AWS 200 services, from core infrastructure to the latest in AI and ML. This support lowered the cost of experimentation for Grey Box, explains Lee, meaning it could “focus more on building products, talking to customers, and making long term decisions while not caring too much about short-term costs.”

More than 350,000 startups have joined AWS Activate since its inception in 2013, participating in a global community and benefitting from peer-to-peer learning. AWS also hosts a range of initiatives to further foster a collaboration and cohesion in regional startup communities, South Korea included. A number of our startups highlighted the recent AWS Unicorn Day Seoul , for instance, as an opportunity to share knowledge and accelerate growth.

The team at AB180 attended and presented at the event, at which “our team learned a lot,” says Nam. “There's a lot of exchange of thoughts and insights as well as the best practices, helping us learn from each other and grow together.” For Config, Unicorn Day “gave us an opportunity to get connected with a broader audience of startups and ecosystems in the field of robotics and AI,” says Son. “It also helped increase the visibility on what we at Config have been building for potential customers, collaborators, and partners in the field.”

For Law&Company, the value of the event also lay in the perspectives and opportunities it provided for scaling beyond South Korea. “It offers global market intelligence that goes beyond networking,” says Jeong. As the company prepares for the next stage of its startup journey and following the success of its platform, Jeong sees connections and shared experiences gained at the event as increasingly important. “We view programs like Unicorn Day as an essential guide for our global expansion and future growth,” he says.

Bringing business to the global stage

Startups in Seoul are building connections within the city and, thanks to its strategic location, are well-placed to forge international ties too. “Seoul is very much an interconnected global city,” says AB180’s Nam. “When you think about the geographical location and position of the city, it's very close with some of the adjacent cities like Beijing, Tokyo, Taipei,” he continues. “Seoul as a city is very easy to travel and very easy to meet with global communities. This is one of the biggest virtues that we're experiencing.” The company has more than 400 partners, many of which located in cities just a couple of hours away from Seoul, explains Nam. “It's integral for me as a founder to be able to be there, talk with our partners in person, and do business collaboration and development all at the same time,” he says.

Similarly, Config chose South Korea to build its MVP because the country serves as a geographical hub between Southeast Asia, “where we build and operate the data pipeline where we generate the large scale, high-quality action data, and major global robotics markets, including the United States, Japan and Korea,” says Hyungmok.

Drawing on South Korea’s talent, infrastructure, dynamism, and location, our startups are aiming high and achieving recognition further afield. “As a founder, I feel a strong sense of responsibility to build great technology with amazing talent here and bring DALPHA to the global stage,” says You.

International expansion was front of mind for a number of our startups, but many founders who are just starting out will be looking to build their brand and their network more locally. Seoul provides a fitting environment to do so. The city was named by the World Intellectual Property Organization as one of top five innovation clusters in the world last year, and as our founders can testify, the startup community is thriving and support from AWS readily available to startups at every stage of their journey.

Seoul’s miracle growth journey looks set to continue, and keeping pace with the speed of the city will bring challenges and opportunities. Config’s Bang admits, “honestly, you don't keep up. You just run with it.” Accessing support and guidance from AWS provides a foundation to help startups navigate this environment and achieve sustainable growth.

Seoul itself also provides a valuable asset. “The city gives us energy. Everyone around us is building something, moving fast and trying new ideas,” says DALPHA’s You. “That kind of environment pushes us to keep going. The key is simple: understand where the technology is, adapt quickly, and keep building and learn from our customers every day.”

Accessing technology, adapting, building, and learning: these four principles can also be found through AWS Activate, which has grown its membership to over 350,000 since its inception in 2013. Free to join and open to founders at every stage of their journey, the program has provided more than $8 billion in credits to startups across the globe, allowing them to test ideas and bring ideas to life. Join AWS Activate today and discover tools and guidance needed to grow.