Lee Seung-gun, founder and CEO of Fintech startup Viva Republica is the youngest member of thriving self-made billionaires in South Korea. Family conglomerates have traditionally dominated the economy.
Earlier this week, Viva Republica, which manages financial app Toss, announced it had raised $410 million in a $7.4 billion funding round when it launched eight years ago. Investors include New York-based Alkon Capital Management and Silicon Valley-based Altos Ventures. Other investors in the previous round included PayPal, Singapore’s state-owned GIC, and venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins.
A Toss spokesperson confirmed Lee’s stake in Viva Republica is worth more than $1 billion after this week’s funding round. Forbes estimates that Lee owns just under 18% of Viva Republica, worth $1.2 billion (with a discount because the company is private).
Viva Republica, based in Seoul’s posh Gangnam district, was founded in 2013. Two years later, Toss was introduced as a money transfer service. Since then, Toss has expanded its lending, credit rating, and stock investment services.
Toss says that there are more than 18 million users in South Korea for a population of 51 million souls. Viva Republica reports that sales in 2020 tripled year-on-year to $390 billion (about $330 million) while losses shrank from 115 billion to 72.5 billion.
Before Lee came to Viva Republica, Lee, a prestigious Seoul National University graduate, was a dentist at a Samsung-affiliated hospital. He got the idea of building Toss after being disappointed to transfer money via cell phone. “That’s how funding should be,” he told Forbes in 2017. “We’ve completely redesigned the mobile financial experience and affordability and hope to bring it to every mobile user in Korea.”
Lee is the youngest on a growing list of Korean people in business who have joined the Three-Point Club in recent years. Coupang Bom founder Kim Bang Shi-hyuk, founder of the agency behind K-pop sensation BTS, and Chang Byung-Gyu, chairman of online game company Krafton, have all become billionaires in recent years.
Korea’s richest list this year is Seo Jung-jin, individual owner and co-founder of Celltrion, for the first time since Forbes published the first list in 2005. Previously, the top seat had always been occupied by one of the leading dogs of conglomerate Samsung or Hyundai, the second generation heir. Who inherit their wealth.