About us
A small cafe meetup for builders in Korean edtech, based in Seoul.
Solo founders, small teams, indie developers, designers, content makers — if you're building something meaningful in this space, you're welcome. New or veteran, pre-revenue or post. Agentic systems, language models, learning tools, content, hardware, classroom tools, parent/student apps — whatever corner you're building in.
About me: I'm Daris Whitfield, an American founder based in London/Korea. For the past 18 months I've been building Hakbap (hakbap.com) — an operating OS for Korean academies. Currently running and or building 30+ modules, an autonomous multi-agent system, a custom SLM fine-tuned on Korean curriculum, an adaptive learning engine, a 16,000 수능 vector corpus, a curriculum publisher, a video lesson pipeline, and 4 native mobile apps.
Long term the goal is hyper-realistic AI avatar teachers, a lifelong learning companion for every student (first grade through first job), and Hakbap-branded physical academy spaces with integrated digital learning hardware.
This is too big for any one team to build alone. That's why I'm starting this meetup.
What this is not: I'm not selling my products. I'm not recruiting. No presentations, no demos, no pitches. If it ever feels like that, tell me. I'll buy your coffee.
What this is: A chance to meet other builders working in the same space, share what you're learning, and have honest conversations about a market that's too big and too important for any one person to solve alone. Real builders only. Curiosity over sales- want to create one space where everyone isn't jsut secretly selling/pitching their own stuff.
Format: 10-15 people, cafe near Gangnam, once a month to start (twice if the vibe is right).
Saturdays 1-3pm (tenative). Everyone covers their own drink.
Want to grab a cup?
Upcoming events
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