Toss (operated by Viva Republica) was founded in 2013 by Lee Seung-gun, a dentist-turned-entrepreneur who saw how painful it was to send money in South Korea. At the time, transferring money required logging into a banking app, entering security certificates, and going through multiple authentication steps. Toss simplified it to a few taps.
That simple money transfer app evolved into South Korea’s dominant fintech super app. Toss now offers banking (Toss Bank, which received a banking license in 2021), stock trading (Toss Securities), insurance comparison, credit score checking, budgeting tools, and merchant payments.
Toss Bank reached profitability in record time for a Korean internet bank, attracting over 9 million customers within its first two years. The broader Toss platform has over 23 million registered users — remarkable in a country of 52 million people. That’s nearly half the population.
The company raised over $1 billion in funding and was valued at $7.4 billion in its 2022 funding round, led by investors including Altos Ventures and Ribbit Capital. Toss has expanded into Vietnam and is exploring other Southeast Asian markets.
Toss’s business model is diverse: interchange fees from banking, commissions from securities trading, insurance referrals, and merchant payment processing. The company is headquartered in Seoul and employs over 2,000 people across its various subsidiaries.
