Building a personalized AI superapp for productivity, entertainment and emotional connection

How Wrtn Is Reimagining AI for Everyday Life

For Djay Lee, the future of AI is personal.

“Your fridge is going to have an AI,” the CPO and co-founder of Wrtn explains. “Your car is going to have an AI, your laptop will have an AI. But I don't believe in a future where every single one of the AIs feels like a different person to you.”

Lee believes there will have to be “a unifying layer” that makes everyone’s interactions with AI bespoke. So your fridge, your car and your laptop will engage with you in a way that’s tailored to your preferences and personality. And it won’t stop there. 

“When you go into a restaurant with robot waiters, you scan your companion, then the robot will instantly shift into your Wrtn companion’s persona.”

This combination – a deep understanding of technology, and a real empathy for how people will want to interact with that technology – is woven into Wrtn’s DNA. 

Making AI accessible 

Founded in Seoul in 2021, Wrtn’s mission is to make AI technology accessible to mainstream users, built on personalisation at scale. It now has five million monthly users. In March 2025, it raised $73.5m in a Series B funding round led by Goodwater Capital.  

Its founders met when they ran the organising committee for the Korea Scholar’s Conference for Youth (KSCY), a non-profit event that attracted 3,000 students every year. Seyoung Lee, Wrtn’s CEO, was the conference’s founder. 

When COVID hit, the committee scrambled to shift everything online. They found, to their surprise, the event worked even better, increasing its reach, engagement, and revenue. 

“We realised that if you put technology together with whatever you're trying to do, it truly is an amplifier and a multiplier,” Lee says. “And so we started looking for the right technology that could help us continue what we had been doing, at a much bigger scale.” 

A key goal of the KSCY was to maximise people’s creativity. And in AI, Wrtn’s founders saw a tool that could take that to previously unimaginable heights. 

“It became evident that generative AI was especially apt for this use case, because oftentimes it’s even better than humans in terms of expressing an idea. We saw this was going to be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.” 

Entertainment and productivity

By aggregating and localising AI services, Wrtn focuses on two domains – entertainment, through its character chat tools, and companionship and productivity. “We put them together as  a companion that helps you with work,” Lee explains. 

It’s designed to be useful, of course, but in a warm, personal and generous way. Lee says Wrtn’s tools help tackle issues like loneliness and social isolation among its Korean user base. 

The character chat product, on the other hand, “is pure dopamine…somewhere between a story, a live experience, and a gaming experience.”

This is where the power of AI can be harnessed to create personalised content on an unprecedented scale. 

“One of the key characteristics of the foundational model is that the marginal cost of new information, or content, is close to zero,” Lee says. “In that case, we thought it would be best to create individual content for every single user.”

So Wrtn empowers people to create their own webtoons by filling in a prompt to set the rules of the world they want to build. “Users make very individual choices, and the AI writes the story as you go along.”

Integrating with people’s lives 

From the beginning, Wrtn’s founders have been driven by a vision that the company should integrate into people’s lives in many different ways. They were inspired by other Korean tech companies, like Naver and Kakao.

“Korea doesn’t have a big population, but we have high GDP per capita,” Lee explains. “We saw those companies went deep into multiple domains of people’s lives, and aggregated the revenue there.”

This ambitious vision, and their belief in where AI is headed, has led them to make some bold decisions. 

When Open AI released GPT-4 in 2023, Wrtn provided it free to all users, at significant cost.

The founders were betting that over time, generative AI would get “cheaper and better” and they believed “there was no real moat related to the technology itself.” What Lee calls “the crazy competition” between Google, Open AI, Anthropic and DeepSeek has “proved us right.”  

“We felt that Moore’s Law is in our favour,” Lee says. “And if that's the case, we didn’t think it was a good idea to discuss cost efficiency at that point – it's better to attract users.” 

The GPT-4 offer certainly did that. “It drove a lot of traffic to our platform,” Lee says. “We acquired a lot of users, and recognition as well.”

Other growth moments were rooted in Wrtn’s humanistic approach, allied with smart tech thinking.

In December 2023, they released a Santa Claus character in the run-up to Christmas. Users had to persuade Santa they had been good, and if they did, they received a gift.

“But to open the gift you needed a key,” Lee says. “We gave everybody one key each, but if you wanted more, you had to invite new users.”

Wrtn gained half a million new users in a month, and topped the global app store for three days straight.  

Bringing in the right talent 

To deliver on their ambitious growth targets, Wrtn hires new talent based on three clear and strict criteria. Each of these three seems designed to help them move quickly, a crucial mindset as AI tech changes so rapidly. 

“The first is raw intelligence and pattern recognition. I think that’s so important in this fast-paced world, because you have to try to be right more than you’re wrong. 

“The second is having a work-orientated life – you’ve got to be willing to grind. And the third is ‘a disagree and commit’ culture. Everyone has an opinion, but when the decision-maker makes the call, we execute, see what happens, and talk about it later.” 

In Antler, Lee says Wrtn found a partner who understood both its mission, and its financial ambitions. 

“We can safely say that Antler has been one of the most helpful investors for closing our Series B round successfully,” Lee says, praising the investor relationships Antler has helped Wrtn build. 

“We can act as if other things are more important. But to be honest, for a start-up, having a successful next round is really, really important.” 

He also says Antler’s global network has boosted their own expansion plans, which are focused on Japan and the Middle East. 

“That’s a great benefit for us. When we are looking at new opportunities, I can reach out to our partner to see if he knows anyone in the region. And he always knows someone.”