Wanted Lab Partners

Wanted Lab Partners

Wanted Lab operates as a Seoul-based venture capital firm investing in Korean technology startups from seed through growth stages. The firm emerged alongside South Korea's maturing startup ecosystem, which produces technically dense founders trained at institutions like KAIST and POSTECH, and at conglomerates such as Samsung and Naver. Its founding thesis rests on the premise that Korea's engineering density remains undervalued relative to output in global software markets. Strategy centers on enterprise software, AI, industrial technology, and digital health, with the firm typically leading or co-leading early-stage rounds. Wanted Lab takes active board roles and provides operational recruiting and go-to-market support through its connection to the broader Wanted network, a Korean HR tech and recruitment platform. This linkage gives portfolio companies a distinct talent-acquisition advantage in a hyper-competitive domestic hiring market. The firm invests primarily in South Korea–domiciled startups, with a secondary emphasis on teams that have near-term plans to enter North American or Southeast Asian markets. Portfolio companies known through public record include tech-enabled service and enterprise platforms formed by repeat founders from the Korean ecosystem. Team size and total assets under management are not publicly disclosed, consistent with the private posture of many Seoul-based venture firms operating outside of public pension fund mandates. The firm maintains its headquarters in Seoul and has not announced additional offices. In March 2023, Wanted Lab merged its recruitment platform entity with a SPAC to list on the Korea Exchange, a corporate transaction that sharpened the firm's institutional profile while keeping the investment arm's partnership structure distinct (per public record, 2023). Wanted Lab's structural differentiator is the integration between its venture capital arm and an operating HR tech business that sources talent for portfolio companies. This departs from the pure financial-capital model of most early-stage Korean VCs and gives the firm a proprietary angle on the single most constrained resource for Korean startups scaling internationally: experienced product and go-to-market talent. The dual structure approximates a hybrid between a venture studio and a traditional fund, though the investment entity is organized as a standard limited partnership.