A law student who changed course
Mark Lee (이인섭) studied economics at Harvard, spent six months on research at Germany's central bank, then worked as a consultant at McKinsey in Germany for under two years before deciding that being one of many in a large firm did not suit him. He has also been head of product at the Korean fintech HonestFund. He went back to law school, and in a trademark class in the autumn of 2018 he learned how large the counterfeit trade was. He incorporated a company in Boston in 2019 and spent a year and a half on three ideas that failed, including a service against return fraud that lasted eight months because customers kept asking for lower fees. He then turned to counterfeits, because he liked fashion brands and saw that computer vision could do the matching.
MarqVision is my first startup and my last.
Mark Lee (이인섭) · Founder and CEO · Forbes Korea interview, published in Korean; English rendering by Signet · 2025-07-28
Lee told Forbes Korea that the company name came first, joining the French marque, meaning trademark, with vision, and that he later took Mark as his English name. A second co-founder, 이도경 (DK Lee), a Cornell business graduate and former Ernst & Young consultant, was introduced as the business head in 2021 and as co-founder and chief business officer in 2022.
Four decisions that shaped the company
First, MarqVision builds in Seoul and sells from Los Angeles. It moved its headquarters to LA in 2021, yet in July 2025 about 180 of its roughly 250 staff worked at MarqVision Korea, including most of the product, IT and service teams, while sales sat mostly in LA. Second, it sells finished work rather than a tool, the shift Michael Seibel urged. Third, it follows fakes offline: a Shanghai office opened in May 2024 with a former head of brand protection for LVMH in Asia and a former head of trust management at Temu and TikTok, and that work is now sold as MarqLaw. Fourth, Lee runs the company on revenue targets. He told Forbes Korea that the top goal is never to let annual growth fall below 100 percent, that yearly goals are cut into quarterly and monthly quests, and that 18 people, including individual contributors, report to him directly.
Our goal is $100 million ARR by mid-2027.
Mark Lee · Founder and CEO · Interview with TechCrunch on the Series B · 2025-09-15
The leaders a Korea hire is likely to meet
The leadership page read on 10 October 2026 lists fifteen leaders. Kaleigh Miller, Global Head of Customer & Ecosystem and general manager of MarqLaw, spent seven years at Amazon on brand registry and built seller governance for TikTok Shop in the US. Dana Herstein, Global Head of Sales, is an IP lawyer who led sales at Extend. Both were announced in April 2026 in a round of five senior hires for sales, platform, customer success, people and finance. Hyuk Choi is Head of Sales, APAC; Binna Kim is Global Head of Product; Daniel Lim is Head of Engineering; and Charles Shin and Rafael Yoon lead product for brand protection and for digital risk protection, the two areas the Seoul product manager postings cover.
How MarqVision says it works and hires
The company publishes seven values: delight the customer, move with urgency, seek operational excellence, own the outcome, be relentlessly resourceful, solve problems at the root and have a company-wide view. Lee adds his own version. He told Forbes Korea he does not like the idea of managers, that every person should know exactly what they own, and that people who finish their work by about 5 p.m. can go home. The Korea postings describe the hiring path: application review, a screening interview, a hiring manager interview, then team, culture fit, case study or bar raiser rounds depending on the seat, followed by a six-month probation. Staff start between 8 and 10 a.m., work from home two days a week and receive US stock options.
For product work the evidence points the other way: most of the product, IT and service teams sit in Korea, and both product manager seats are in Seoul. Sales is different. The global and APAC sales heads appear on the leadership page, sales teams sit mostly in LA, and the Seoul customer success seat reports to an APAC team lead.
