From hotel janitor to AI billionaire: The man behind South Korea’s travel giant Yanolja
Seoul: South Korean billionaire Lee Su-jin, the founder of AI-driven travel superapp Yanolja, has gone from cleaning hotel rooms to running a $7 billion travel tech empire.
Lee, 47, was orphaned as a child and in his early 20s worked as a janitor at a short-stay “love hotel” in South Korea — a job that gave him a bed and a steady wage. When an anti-prostitution law in 2004 threatened to wipe out the industry, Lee decided to rebrand it.
He launched a hotel-review website in 2005, which became Yanolja — meaning “Hey, let’s play” in Korean — in 2007. His idea was simple: modernize stigmatized motels, make them safe, convenient and affordable for young couples and travelers.
That idea scaled. What started as an ad platform for love hotels expanded into hotel bookings, leisure activities, transport and cloud-based hotel management software.
Today Yanolja is South Korea’s largest travel platform, with over 57 million downloads, and operates its SaaS solutions in 1.3 million properties across 206 countries. It became Korea’s 8th unicorn in 2019 after investment from Singapore’s GIC and Booking Holdings, and in 2021 raised $1.7 billion from SoftBank Vision Fund 2 at a $7 billion valuation.
Lee, who owns about 17% of the company with his family, is worth $1.05 billion, according to Forbes Real-Time Billionaires.
From janitor to architect of an AI-powered global travel platform, Lee calls it survival: “If all the motels relied on love, they’d starve to death.”
