Startup Failures in South Korea

Built for Korean semiconductor supply chains — then US export controls rewrote the rules every 6 months.

Korea's B2B delivery giant collapsed when driver costs exploded and Series D investors vanished.

Kakao's brokerage arm sank under insider trading scandal and regulatory wrath.

A dungeon crawler dragged into real-world legal dungeons by its former employer.

South Korea's bargain pioneer couldn't compete in the age of Coupang's juggernaut.

Korea's super-app darling built a brokerage too fast and nearly took down the whole empire.

Korea's biggest blockchain game token lost 80% in 48 hours after lying about token supply.

A pet social network that KakaoTalk demolished in eight months with a single feature update.

Korea's car-sharing king IPO'd at the worst moment and lost two-thirds of its value in 90 days.

The Terra-based synthetic stock protocol lost $90M to an oracle exploit then died with Luna

$60 billion evaporated in seventy-two hours when an algorithmic stablecoin's peg broke—and its founder allegedly knew it could.

The algorithmic stablecoin that destroyed $40 billion in value in 72 hours.

The 19.5% APY DeFi protocol that built the house of cards that brought down Terra and $40B in user wealth

The algorithmic stablecoin that wiped $40B from crypto markets in 72 hours

South Korean algorithmic stablecoin erased ~$40B in 72 hours in May 2022—the largest single crypto collapse in history and the trigger for a global contagion wave.

The unofficial Netflix Squid Game crypto went from $0.01 to $2,861 in days then the developers pulled $3.4M and vanished

Korea's bank-backed neobank crushed between two ecosystem giants.

A $50M bet on Western mobile gaming returned nothing but a failed acquisition spree.

South Korea's Uber-killer was itself killed by a law named after it.

COVID killed what four years of esports couldn't — Nexon's flagship venue.

$299, 24-hour battery, required a Samsung phone — returned by 30% of buyers.

South Korea's Facebook — 27 million Korean users — tried to conquer America. Zero Americans wanted it.

South Korea's NLP startup outresourced by the conglomerates that own the Korean internet

South Korea's original flash-sale pioneer — a decade of decline ending in payment collapse

Korean synthetic data startup made obsolete by the LLM era before Series A closed

South Korea audio social platform that raised $15M and operated across 40 countries before live audio became a graveyard as Clubhouse hype died and Spotify Greenroom failed.

South Korea's neobank competing against a bank owned by the country's most used app

South Korean crypto yield platform promising 10 percent annual returns by deploying customer assets through algorithmic trading strategies