Choi Soo-yeon

Choi Soo-yeon took the helm of Naver, South Korea’s dominant internet company, in 2022, becoming its youngest-ever CEO and second female chief. Now in her second term, she is steering the company through an AI transformation: In 2025, the company posted record revenue of 12 trillion won ($8.2 billion), up 12.1% year over year. AI accounted for more than half of the growth in its advertising revenue in the first quarter of 2026. Naver is also developing its own AI model that, it hopes, can better handle queries in Korean, and is working on developing an integrated AI agent. While the company is best known for its search engine, Naver also owns the U.S. platform Poshmark, the Spanish C2C platform Wallapop, and the webcomics platform Webtoon.