Why Couldn't We Build a World-Class Software Company in Seoul?

Lunit didn’t start with a grand vision of transforming healthcare. It started with a much simpler question: Why hasn’t Korea produced a world-class software company?

Korea had built some of the world’s best manufacturing companies, like Samsung and Hyundai. But there were few Korean software companies that could compete on the global stage.

It was tempting to think this was because we lacked the talent. But at KAIST, I was surrounded by people who were as smart and capable as anyone in the world. So I began to wonder whether the real problem wasn’t a lack of talent, but a lack of ambition. Maybe no one had seriously tried. And if that was the case, why couldn’t we?

Fortunately, I had a few friends who thought the same way. We’d met in a hip-hop club at university. We had different backgrounds and interests, but we shared a love of learning new technologies and building things. Deep learning was just beginning to show what it could do, and we thought it might change everything. So in 2013, six of us started a company.

We didn’t start in healthcare. Our first product was a fashion service built around image recognition. The technology worked, but customers didn’t care much about it. That taught us an important lesson: building something technically impressive is not the same as building something people need.

Eventually, we found healthcare.

In fashion, improving an algorithm’s accuracy by a few percentage points might not make much difference. In medicine, the same improvement could save someone’s life. It was a field where the technology we knew how to build could actually matter.

Looking back, we didn’t start Lunit because we had a plan to conquer cancer. We started because we believed we could build a world-class technology company, and because we had a group of friends willing to try.

Over time, that ambition grew into something bigger: using AI to advance healthcare and ultimately conquer cancer.

There’s a tendency to think great companies begin with great visions. But I suspect it’s often the other way around. You start with a problem that bothers you, find people who care about it as much as you do, and begin building. Sometimes the mission reveals itself along the way.