SEOUL: In July 2013, with \u201cGangnam Style\u201d past a billion views on YouTube and still climbing, Psy sent his global followers to a tiny Seoul startup: \u201cUse flitto.com to read my tweets in your own language.\u201d<\/p>\n
Flitto was then a small Seoul-based translation app built around Korean pop or K-pop fans translating celebrity posts for reward points. K-pop gave the young service a ready-made global community.<\/p>\n
Thirteen years later, the app is a Kosdaq-listed artificial intelligence (AI) company whose largest customers are US technology giants. In late June, Flitto disclosed that two data supply contracts with global information technology clients had been more than doubled to a combined 31.6 billion won.<\/p>\n
The larger of the two, at 22.7 billion won, exceeds Flitto\u2019s entire 2024 revenue.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen we started, we said we were a data company. Nobody believed us,\u201d said founder and chief executive officer Lee Jung-soo.<\/p>\n
He was seated in front of a screen showing his newest project, Flitto Marketplace \u2013 a platform where firms with unused data can list it for AI buyers.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m glad we could prove it before the company went under.\u201d<\/p>\n
The proof is now in the finances. Revenue rose 77% last year to 36 billion won, and the operating margin swung from minus 2% in 2024 to 17% in 2025, the first meaningful annual profit in the company\u2019s history.<\/p>\n
About 71% of first-quarter revenue this year came from exports, and within the core data business, roughly 95% went to customers in the United States.<\/p>\n
Flitto\u2019s founding bet in 2012 was that language data would become valuable to whichever AI technology eventually won.<\/p>\n
That hypothesis took nearly a decade to pay off.<\/p>\n
\u201cCrowdsourced translation was never the end goal,\u201d Lee said. \u201cIt was the only practical way to collect data at the time.\u201d<\/p>\n
The market arrived with neural machine translation.<\/p>\n
Services like Naver\u2019s Papago, launched in 2016, weakened Flitto\u2019s original consumer platform but raised demand for the sentences, voices and corrections to train the new systems. \u2014 The Korea Herald\/ANN<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"SEOUL: In July 2013, with \u201cGangnam Style\u201d past a billion views on YouTube and still climbing, Psy sent…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":92961,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[1137,6845,26078,48821,195],"class_list":["post-92960","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-korea","tag-ai","tag-app","tag-corporate-news","tag-flitto","tag-k-pop"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92960","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=92960"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/92960\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/92961"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=92960"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=92960"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/korea\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=92960"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}