She became richest self-made woman in Korea, built a $3B business and nearly lost it all

This is the story of how a young girl from a port city in South Korea built a $3B company called Market Kurly (renamed to Kurly), registered losses of $350M and bounced back again.

Let’s read her story of resilience and how she became a self-made millionaire in Korea.

We think it's impossible to build something from where we are today. Maybe our town is too small or the funding system is non-conducive or your peers are unambitious.

But dreams don't cost anything. You don't know what surprises are waiting when you let your life happen and force yourself to believe.

This is the story of Sophie Kim.

Sophie Kim was born in Ulsan near Busan, South-Korea, a port town built around Hyundai's shipping industry.

Sophie was the daughter of two doctors, in a home where food was not just what they ate. It was considered fuel, medicine for the body.

Every day the belief was reinforced at breakfast, lunch and dinner. But she never knew this one aspect of upbringing will lead to building a billion dollar business.

She wanted to go to the US for her undergraduate studies. So she convinced her parents to let her go to Wellesley Women's College in Boston, study International Relations, and explore the world. To her surprise, her parents agreed.

She wanted to study further, complete her Phd and get into teaching professionally. But her mentor spotted her talent and asked her to try something else first before committing to academics full-time.

Her search got her into banking at Goldman Sachs in Hong Kong at 24 covering the Asia Pacific region.

She spent almost 15 years between investment banking moving across three cities including Singapore, before finally coming back to Seoul.

When she came back to Seoul, she went looking for good kale for her green juice and she couldn't find any that went through her level of quality.

Not in the local markets, not in the supermarkets. Local markets were selling the low quality version optimised for cost. The other was selling low quality wrapped in a plastic film optimised for real estate.

But none of them were optimised for quality.

Out of sheer frustration she started visiting local farmers and saw the difference immediately. The produce was so fresh, in texture, in colour and in taste.

The farmers said they can’t find the right buyers for their quality products and she realised these farmers were selling at razor-thin margins, often struggling to sell their produce at all.

She started driving to the countryside regularly to source her own food. She took trips to the Majang-dong meat market for half a cow's worth of beef and split it with coworkers.

She found vendors for sea-food, for dairy, for herbs. Everything she needed, she found someone growing a high quality version in the farms.

She found a dairy that had shut down for lack of customers and asked the founder to reopen it and become her supplier.

She built trust and a network on the ground, farm by farm. That trust became her moat.

The more she researched, the more she saw the gap, and kept adding to her own informal portfolio of suppliers.

She first thought about building a farmers' market from the ground up, the way it exists in different US cities.

But the problem was obvious: carrying inventory into cities was a financial burden for farmers and moving it between cities meant wastage.

So she built an online model instead. Not just a platform to shop online but a platform for fresh delivery of perishable foods. A category that did not exist before and was so difficult to operate.

People can order before 11pm, get it delivered by 7am.

On 1 January 2015, she launched "The Farmers" and later renamed it Kurly.

She had no experience in retail or logistics, and she launched with just 30 products.

The idea was simple but the operations were not.

Cold storage, transport, being on time, every piece of it was a challenge in a market that didn't exist yet in Seoul.

People needed to trust Kurly for timely delivery so they can cook on time for their kids, for their own lunch, for office.

One lost customer or a bad review, could cost Kurly its reputation.

But they started building fast. They raised their first round in March 2015, for $4.5M, just two months after launch. They had their first customers and the data to show it was working.

To scale, they needed to move fast, and grow their inventory fast which meant- trucks, storage, freezers, whatever it took to get the best product out quickly.

The numbers back up how fast they grew.

In 2016, sales reached 17.3 billion won, almost 6x their 2015 number. By 2017, they'd hit 50 billion won. Product count went from 30 to 1,300, and monthly sales crossed 2 billion won.

In 2018, they added cosmetics, which grew at 200% annually and helped offset thin grocery margins.

They kept pushing private-label products, which reached about 20% of sales by 2024, materially improving gross margin.

By 2024, Kurly had raised a cumulative $860 million-plus from investors including Sequoia Capital, HongShan, Anchor Equity Partners, Hillhouse.

The 2025 tie-up with Naver launched a Kurly storefront called Kurly N Mart inside Naver's AI-powered shopping platform, giving Kurly access to Naver's roughly 40 million users without having to build that reach alone.

"By combining Naver's vast data and 40 million users with Kurly's strengths in fresh food and overnight delivery, we aim to deliver a grocery shopping experience unlike anything that's come before."- said Sophie in an interview.

Building is never a straight line up.

The biggest threat came once the company got big.

Their biggest competitor- Coupang, went public in 2021 and kept expanding aggressively. They eventually acquired roughly a quarter of the entire domestic e-commerce market. They’re practically the Amazon in South Korea.

Others players were getting big too, larger funding, selling almost everything, like Amazon: Naver and Shinsegae.

In 2022, Kurly filed for an IPO carrying 500 billion won in accumulated losses.

A few months before it went live, they withdrew it. That sent a quake through the company and their investors and it lost several trillion won in valuation.

Kurly was serving a niche compared to the bigger players: high-quality perishables. That niche was her moat but it made the business brutally capital-intensive.

The losses compounded and she couldn't justify the valuation anymore.

But she kept raising, and her own stake got diluted down to a mere 6%.

She moved ahead smartly, guided by trusted advisors, so she wouldn't lose control of the company in a hostile acquisition.

Kurly restructured its investor terms, including a three-year lockup for new backers. The IPO stayed shelved through 2023 and 2024.

Sophie is moving ahead again with strengthening Kurly's case for an IPO. The last two quarters have been profitable, according to public data. They have now introduced Kurly in America too.

Per a 2026 regulatory filing, the South Korean online grocery platform reported consolidated revenue of 734.8 billion won ($519.8 million) for the second quarter, up 27% from a year earlier.

Operating profit surged to 27.4 billion won, nearly 20 times higher than a year earlier, while net profit reached 25.4 billion won.

Kurly has expanded into beauty, home and living, and fashion to diversify revenue away from capital-intensive grocery delivery. Sophie launched Beauty Kurly to focus specifically on luxury and independent beauty brands, and the fashion division is using content as its sales engine.

This year, Kurly acquired Plannery, a South Korean company that runs HeyJoyce, a platform that specialises in career-building services for women. An odd-match one would say. But Sophie knows what she’s doing.

She says, “HeyJoyce is a community of working women that overlaps 100 per cent with our core customers”.

“And learning more about how our customers think and how they make decisions up close can change the game for most business owners. They become partners instead. And that’s exactly what Kurly is doing with their community at Hey Joyce.

She was an ordinary girl of doctor parents who fulfilled her dream of studying in the US. She worked at investment banks just like any other employee. But one thing sets her apart: how she built her network.

She wasn't sitting alone in a cafe trying to figure it all out. She took her car, drove to the markets herself, and built trust on the ground with farmers. She likely leaned on ex-colleagues and old partners to help raise funds too.

No business is built alone. You need people to introduce you, to hold your hand into the room, to vouch for your worth, and to believe in your vision, if you want to build something this big.

Kim's moat was never just the app. Coupang or Naver could easily out-build the app.

The moat was the cold chain plus the trust she built over years driving to the farms.

She built a logistics system so precise that it could move live octopus and delicate produce overnight without spoilage, sourced directly from farmers and fishermen who had no other reliable route to Seoul's kitchens.

That combination is expensive and slow to copy.

It requires both the capital for refrigerated logistics and years of one-by-one supplier relationships .

She wasn't a food person who picked up business skills.

She had 15 years of evaluating other people’s business before she started her own.

From moving countries to building relationships with farmers and dairy farms, none of it was taught in a school. She had 15 years of experience but building a supply chain of perishable food is a different category.

Especially building a category from scratch.

She could continue buying just for herself. But she spotted a problem and executed it to a billion-dollar company. But she was resilient and she started anyway.