Founder Profile
Lee Hae-jin
Last reviewed: September 2026 · By Swet Parvadiya
Background
Lee Hae-jin possessed an incredibly rigorous, highly analytical background in advanced computer science, complex algorithmic engineering, and massive-scale data structuring. Having successfully graduated from the incredibly elite Seoul National University and operating as a fiercely skilled software developer at Samsung SDS, this intense technological foundation provided the exact engineering leverage required to successfully pioneer the massive Naver corporation.
Founding Story
Lee Hae-jin is an absolutely brilliant South Korean technology entrepreneur and the profoundly influential founding patriarch fundamentally responsible for architecting the massively dominant Naver digital empire. Operating as a fiercely talented engineer within the massive Samsung SDS conglomerate, Lee aggressively recognized the massive, completely untapped potential for a highly localized, hyper-optimized Korean search engine. In 1999, he relentlessly launched Naver, completely pioneering the highly innovative 'Comprehensive Search' feature that displayed blogs, websites, and images on a single massive page. By fiercely navigating the incredibly competitive dot-com boom and relentlessly out-engineering massive global monopolies like Google in the South Korean market, his absolutely rigorous strategic leadership permanently established Naver as an absolute multi-billion dollar digital juggernaut.