Inbae Lee
โ›ณ๏ธ

Inbae Lee

VC, deep tech in Korea (covering ๐Ÿ‡บ๐Ÿ‡ธ)

Always looking to connect with smart folks and (potential) founders. Reach me at i@inbae.io.

10 months ago

About

I rep the best early stage VC in Korea. I read, write, twiddle, sample, explore, and rave about things and people in tech.

Work Experience

2019 โ€” Now
  • Deep tech investments (see Projects section)
  • Global affairs (fund/GP level partnership, external relations)
2016 โ€” 2018
  • Conscription to parent company as CEO staff
  • Incubation and operation of Kakao Brain Corp
  • Business development for AI Business Team (smart speaker & voice assistant platform)
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2015 โ€” 2016
  • Acquired by Kakao Corp in 2015
  • Rebranded as Kakao Ventures in 2017
2011 โ€” 2014
Persevered at Samsung Electronics (employment also served as military requirement substitution)
  • Storage software stack for Galaxy smartphones
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2008 โ€” 2010
  • Storage firmware for iPods, iPhones, iPads, and Apple TV
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Education

2003 โ€” 2008
Pittsburgh, PA, ๐Ÿ‡บ๐Ÿ‡ธ
  • BS + MS (integrated) in Computer Engineering
  • Minor in Computer Science
2000 โ€” 2003
Middletown, RI, ๐Ÿ‡บ๐Ÿ‡ธ

Cum Laude

Projects

Ongoing
What I do at Kakao Ventures

Portfolios I keep tabs on:
๐Ÿ‡ฐ๐Ÿ‡ท kiboko.team
๐Ÿ‡ฐ๐Ÿ‡ท rebellions.ai
๐Ÿ‡บ๐Ÿ‡ธ laseinnovation.com
๐Ÿ‡บ๐Ÿ‡ธ bluespace.ai
๐Ÿ‡บ๐Ÿ‡ธ minervaproject.com
๐Ÿ‡บ๐Ÿ‡ธ spatial.io
๐Ÿ‡บ๐Ÿ‡ธ getwair.com
๐Ÿ‡บ๐Ÿ‡ธ mojo.vision

Maintainer of:
โœ๏ธ medium.com/kakaoventures
๐Ÿฆ twitter.com/kakaoventures

2022
  • Rebellions.ai is Korea's best fabless startup, founded in 2020 by ex- Morgan Stanley / IBM / SpaceX / Samsung / Hynix folks. Boasting hyper scalable/flexible architecture, silicon-proven top notch performance, the team is building NPU accelerators for system trading & AI workload in data centers. Total raise is at 100B KRW ($80M) to date from instutionals Korea and Singapore.
  • Participated in Seed, Pre- Series A, Series A rounds
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2020
Series A of Lase Innovation

Lase Innovation is commercializing laser particles (invented by Prof. Andy Yun of Harvard Medical School) small enough to be injected into living cells, for scientific barcoding purposes. Laser barcodes to be applied to Flow Cytometry, Microscopy, Single Cell Sequencing for drug & disease researchers to inspect cell or tissue samples better.

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2019
Seed of BlueSpace
  • Autonomous driving startup BlueSpace.ai was founded by founders and members of Drive.ai (acq. by Apple) to create perception software, based on 4D lidar tech, no pre-training required, for fleet vans and buses
  • Chosen as 2021 NASA iTech Cycle I company
  • youtube.com/watch?v=NumYBOโ€ฆ
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2019
Series C of Minerva Project
  • Opportunistically invested into minervaproject.com, the backend business entity for Minerva University (minerva.edu), at a later round than Benchmark Capital, ByteDance, and TAL Education
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Writing

2021

A ten-part series on the career pivot I made for younger Korean audience
์—”์ง€๋‹ˆ์–ด๋ง์—์„œ ๋ฒค์ฒ˜์บํ”ผํƒˆ๋กœ ์ „ํ–ฅํ•˜๊ฒŒ ๋œ ์ด์•ผ๊ธฐ๋ฅผ 10ํŽธ์˜ ๋ธ”๋กœ๊ทธ ๊ธ€๋กœ ํ’€์–ด ์„ค๋ช…ํ•œ ๋ธŒ๋Ÿฐ์น˜ ์‹œ๋ฆฌ์ฆˆ

2021

A two part exposition on why Kakao Ventures isn't a "CVC" (Corporate VC) of Kakao

Speaking

2021

Appeared on the Korea's national English news channel for a light touch on why Korean startups end up raising growth capital from overseas

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Features

2021

Key interview questions:
Q. ๊ฐœ๋ฐœ์ž๋กœ ์ผํ•˜์‹œ๋‹ค๊ฐ€ ๋ณธ์ธ์˜ ์ปค๋ฆฌ์–ด๋ฅผ ๋ฐ”๊พผ ๊ณ„๊ธฐ๊ฐ€ ์žˆ์œผ์‹ ๊ฐ€์š”? VC๋Š” ๋น„์ฆˆ๋‹ˆ์Šค ๊ฒฝํ—˜์ด๋‚˜ ์ปจ์„คํŒ… ๊ฒฝํ—˜์ด ํ•„์š”ํ•  ๊ฒƒ ๊ฐ™์€๋ฐ, ๊ฐœ๋ฐœ์ž ์ถœ์‹ ์œผ๋กœ ์–ด๋–ป๊ฒŒ ์ฑ„์šฉ ๊ณผ์ •์„ ํ†ต๊ณผํ•˜์…จ๋‚˜์š”?
Q. ๋ฒค์ฒ˜์บํ”ผํƒˆ์€ ๋‹ค์–‘ํ•œ ์‚ฐ์—…์˜ ๊ฒฝ๋ ฅ์ž๊ฐ€ ๋ชจ์—ฌ ์žˆ์„ ๊ฒƒ ๊ฐ™์€๋ฐ, ์ด๋“ค์€ ์–ด๋–ป๊ฒŒ ์ผํ•˜๊ณ  ์†Œํ†ตํ•˜๋‚˜์š”?
Q. ๋ณดํ†ต์€ ํˆฌ์ž์‚ฌ๊ฐ€ โ€˜๊ฐ‘โ€™์ด๊ณ  ์ฐฝ์—…๊ฐ€๋Š” โ€˜์„โ€™์ด๋ผ๊ณ  ์ƒ๊ฐํ•˜๋Š”๋ฐ, ์ง์ ‘ ํˆฌ์žํ•˜๋Š” ์ž…์žฅ์—์„œ๋Š” ์–ด๋–ป๊ฒŒ ์ƒ๊ฐํ•˜์‹œ๋‚˜์š”?
Q. ์œ ๋Šฅํ•œ VC๋Š” ์–ด๋–ค ๊ธฐ์ค€์œผ๋กœ ํ‰๊ฐ€๋˜๋‚˜์š”?

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2020

Key interview questions:
Q. ์นด์นด์˜ค๋ฒค์ฒ˜์Šค๋Š” ์ดˆ๊ธฐ ํˆฌ์ž์ž ์—ญํ• ์„ ํ•˜๊ณ  ์žˆ๋‹ค. ์ดˆ๊ธฐ ํˆฌ์ž๋ž€ ์–ด๋–ค ์˜๋ฏธ์ธ๊ฐ€? / ๋ฒค์ฒ˜ ์บํ”ผํ„ธ์ด ์ •๋Ÿ‰์  ์ง€ํ‘œ๊ฐ€ ์—†๋Š” ์ดˆ๊ธฐ ์Šคํƒ€ํŠธ์—…์„ ๋Œ€์ƒ์œผ๋กœ ํˆฌ์ž๋ฅผ ๊ฐํ–‰ํ•˜๋ ค๋ฉด ์ฐฝ์—…๊ฐ€ ์ •์‹ ์„ ์ค‘์ ์ ์œผ๋กœ ๋ณผ ์ˆ˜๋ฐ–์— ์—†์„ ๊ฒƒ ๊ฐ™๋‹ค.
Q. ์Šคํƒ€ํŠธ์—…์—์„œ ๋””์ž์ธ์— ๋Œ€ํ•œ ์ธ์‹์€ ์–ด๋А ์ •๋„์ธ๊ฐ€? ๋””์ž์ด๋„ˆ๊ฐ€ ๊ณต๋™ ์ฐฝ์—…์ž์ธ ์†Œ๊ฐœํ•  ๋งŒํ•œ ์Šคํƒ€ํŠธ์—…์ด ์žˆ๋‹ค๋ฉด?
Q. ์นด์นด์˜ค๋ฒค์ฒ˜์Šค๋Š” ํˆฌ์žํ•œ ํฌํŠธํด๋ฆฌ์˜ค ๊ธฐ์—…์„ โ€˜ํŒจ๋ฐ€๋ฆฌโ€™๋ผ๊ณ  ๋ถ€๋ฅธ๋‹ค. ํ˜ธ์นญ์—์„œ ํˆฌ์ž์‚ฌ์™€ ํฌํŠธํด๋ฆฌ์˜ค ๊ด€๊ณ„๋ฅผ ๋„˜์–ด์„  ๋ˆ๋ˆํ•œ ์šฐ์ •์ด ๋ฌป์–ด๋‚œ๋‹ค. ๋ฏธ๋ž˜์˜ ํŒจ๋ฐ€๋ฆฌ๊ฐ€ ๋  ์ฐฝ์—…๊ฐ€๋“ค์—๊ฒŒ ๋“ค๋ ค์ฃผ๊ณ  ์‹ถ์€ ์กฐ์–ธ์ด ์žˆ๋‹ค๋ฉด?

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