It is lunchtime at a small café in Seoul’s Seongsu district. A customer walks up to the counter, glances at a little screen beside the register, and walks away with an iced americano. She never touched her phone. She never pulled out a card. The screen recognized her face, and the Toss super app charged her account in under a second.
For most foreigners, the name Toss means nothing. In South Korea, however, it is almost impossible to avoid. More than 30 million people have signed up for the app. That is well over half the population. It started as a way to send money without the pain of Korean online banking. Today, the Toss super app is a bank, a brokerage, a payment network, a phone carrier and an app store, all wrapped inside one blue icon.
It is also, finally, a money machine. In the first half of 2026, Viva Republica, the company behind Toss, reported revenue of ₩1.89 trillion, or about $1.34 billion. Net profit more than doubled. Yet its long-awaited Nasdaq listing has just been put on hold.
This is the story of how a former dentist with eight failed startups built Korea’s most valuable fintech company. It is also a guide to what the Toss super app means for investors, for rivals like Kakao, and for foreigners living in Korea.
Lee Seung-gun did not look like a typical founder. Born in Seoul in 1982, he graduated from Seoul National University’s School of Dentistry in 2007. He then began his residency at Samsung Medical Center, one of the most prestigious hospitals in the country. In other words, he was on a safe, respected and well-paid track.
In 2011, he walked away from it. According to Fortune, he put about $105,000 of his own savings into a new company called Viva Republica. Then he started to fail.
First came a social network. Next came a voting app. Over roughly four years, Lee and his small team launched eight products, and none of them took off. At one low point, he had about $14 in his bank account. He even asked employees to keep working without pay. Later, he described many of those early ideas as “rubbish.”
However, the failures taught the team something useful. They learned to ship fast, to watch user data closely and to drop ideas that were not working. As a result, when the right idea finally appeared, they were ready to move.
The right idea was painfully simple: let people send money easily.
Before Toss, a Korean bank transfer could be a small ordeal. Online banking relied on a government-mandated digital certificate system. Users had to install security plug-ins, store certificate files, and type long passwords on clunky web pages. Many sites only worked properly on Internet Explorer. For a country that built some of the world’s fastest broadband, it was a strange bottleneck. The certificate rule was not fully scrapped until 2020.
Lee wanted something closer to Venmo. In fact, he later told CNBC that he believed the service “should exist in Korean society — regardless of whether it was legal.” That was not just a figure of speech. Peer-to-peer money transfer apps were effectively blocked under Korean rules at the time. When an early version launched, regulators shut it down.
So the team spent about a year persuading officials. Eventually, in 2015, regulators eased the rules, and Toss launched properly. The pitch was easy to understand. Pick a contact, type an amount, enter a short PIN, and the money is gone. Three steps instead of a dozen.
Consequently, Koreans adopted it at astonishing speed. Splitting a dinner bill, paying back a friend for concert tickets or sending a wedding gift suddenly took seconds. By 2018, after an $80 million funding round, Viva Republica became one of Korea’s first fintech unicorns. By 2021, it was valued at about $7.4 billion, according to the Wikipedia entry on Viva Republica.
Here is the puzzle that confused analysts for years. Sending money on Toss is free. Most of its features are free. So how does a free app earn ₩2.7 trillion a year?
Lee explained it neatly in his interview with Fortune. “Unlike other fintech players, user growth doesn’t really correlate with revenue,” he said. “Most revenue comes from business customers.”
In practice, the Toss super app works like a shopping mall for financial products. Toss owns the foot traffic. Banks, card companies, insurers and lenders pay to reach those customers. For example, when you compare loan offers inside Toss, the lender that wins your business pays Toss a fee. Similarly, when you sign up for a credit card through the app, the card issuer pays for the referral. Advertising, commerce and payments add further layers.
The company splits this into two main segments. In the first half of 2026, according to the Korea Herald, the “SuperApp Service” segment brought in ₩1.33 trillion, or 70.3% of revenue. Meanwhile, the “Payments Network Service” segment, led by Toss Payments, contributed ₩561.3 billion, or 29.7%.
Toss Payments matters more than its name suggests. It handles online checkout for a huge number of Korean e-commerce sites. Therefore, even people who never open the Toss app often pay through Toss infrastructure without realizing it.
For most of its life, this Korean fintech unicorn burned cash. Critics argued that a free money-transfer app could never become a real business. In 2024, the company proved them wrong with its first annual profit.
Then 2025 turned a modest profit into a big one. Annual revenue rose about 38% to ₩2.7 trillion, up from ₩1.95 trillion. Operating profit jumped from ₩90.7 billion to ₩336 billion. Net profit soared about ninefold, to ₩201.8 billion.
The momentum has carried into 2026. For the first half alone, the numbers look like this:
| Metric (H1 2026) | Amount | Change YoY |
|---|---|---|
| Revenue | ₩1.89 trillion | +53.2% |
| Operating profit | ₩246.1 billion | +59.2% |
| Net profit | ₩232.8 billion | +120.2% |
In other words, Toss earned more net profit in six months of 2026 than in all of 2025. Few consumer apps anywhere grow revenue by more than 50% at this scale while also widening margins.
For comparison, consider its closest rival. Kakao Pay, the payment arm of the messaging giant behind KakaoTalk, reported 2025 revenue of ₩958.4 billion, according to Digital Today. Its operating profit was ₩50.4 billion, its first full-year profit. Kakao Pay rides on a messenger that almost every Korean uses, as we explained in our piece on why Korea uses only KakaoTalk. Even so, Toss now earns nearly three times as much revenue and over six times as much operating profit.
Two subsidiaries explain much of this surge.
Toss Bank opened in October 2021 as Korea’s third internet-only bank. It does not have a separate app. Instead, it lives inside the Toss super app, which gives it millions of potential customers at almost zero marketing cost. According to the Seoul Economic Daily, Toss Bank had 13.7 million customers by the third quarter of 2025. Its 2025 net profit roughly doubled from ₩43.3 billion a year earlier. We compared it with KakaoBank and K Bank in our report on Korea’s internet banks.
Toss Securities may be an even bigger story. It is now the top Korean broker for overseas stock trading. In 2025, it earned ₩449.4 billion in commissions from foreign stock trading alone. In the first quarter of 2026, its operating revenue more than doubled to ₩340.5 billion.
The secret weapon was fractional shares. Since 2022, Toss Securities has let users buy a slice of an expensive US stock with just a few thousand won. For young Koreans, that made Nvidia or Tesla feel as easy to buy as a coffee. The timing was perfect. Korean retail investors now hold close to $200 billion in US stocks, a trend we covered in our story on Korea’s US stock investors. Asia News Network quoted Toss’s own strategist saying that boom is “only getting started.”
Remember the café customer in Seongsu? She was using Toss Face Pay, the company’s boldest bet yet.
The idea is simple. You register your face and a payment method in the app once. After that, you can pay at any store with a Toss terminal just by looking at the screen. There is no card and no phone. The company says each payment takes less than a second and uses liveness detection to block photos and masks.
Adoption has been rapid. Face Pay passed 1 million users in November 2025, only a couple of months after its official rollout, according to a Toss announcement. By the middle of 2026, it had more than 6 million users. By July, it had 7 million.
To get there, Toss has been aggressive. It has placed terminals in more than 5,000 small and mid-sized supermarkets. In addition, it launched a co-branded credit card that pays up to 20% back on Face Pay purchases at cafés, restaurants and convenience stores. It even bundles Face Pay coupons with Toss Mobile, its own budget phone plan. That plan competes in the crowded market we described in our guide to Korea’s budget phone plans.
Naturally, rivals have noticed. Naver Pay has pushed its own facial payment system and says its terminal network passed 100,000 merchants in the first half of 2026. According to Asia Economy, a Bank of Korea survey found that about half of biometric payment users care more about security than convenience. In a country still scarred by voice phishing scams, that concern is not abstract. Our report on Korea’s voice phishing epidemic shows why trust is such a fragile asset here.
Toss’s next move borrows from China’s playbook. WeChat proved that a single app can host thousands of smaller “mini programs.” Toss wants to do the same in Korea.
In July 2025, it opened a platform called Apps in Toss. Outside developers can build lightweight mini apps that run inside Toss, using its login, payments and huge user base. Growth has been steep. The platform started with about 100 mini apps. It reached 1,000 by February 2026 and 5,000 by June. By August 2026, it had passed 10,000, according to the Toss newsroom.
The mini apps now draw about 4 million monthly users. Notably, about two-thirds of the partners are solo developers, and 63% of partner accounts are already earning revenue. The apps range from games and content to AI tools and everyday services.
For Viva Republica, this changes the story it can tell investors. A finance app sells loans and cards. By contrast, a true super app owns the user’s whole day. That second story usually earns a much higher valuation.
That brings us to the biggest open question: when will the public finally get a chance to buy shares?
The Toss IPO has had a winding path. In October 2024, the company dropped plans for a Korean listing and turned to the United States instead, according to KED Global. In July 2025, Reuters reported that Toss was aiming for a Nasdaq debut in the second quarter of 2026 at a valuation above $10 billion.
By January 2026, the plan looked firm. The Seoul Economic Daily reported that Toss had begun talks with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. It planned a confidential filing in the first quarter and had lined up JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley, UBS and Goldman Sachs. Local bankers, however, suggested a more modest valuation in the range of ₩10 trillion to ₩15 trillion.
Then, in July 2026, the plan stalled. As The Paypers reported, Toss shelved its plan to list American depositary receipts this year. The company has not given a reason or a new timeline.
There are several plausible explanations. First, the corporate structure is complex. Toss Bank has its own separate group of investors, partly because Korean law limits how much of a bank a non-financial company can own. Aligning those shareholders is not easy. Second, the US IPO market turned choppy this fall. In late September, for instance, wearable maker Oura became the latest company to delay its US listing. Third, Toss may simply not be in a hurry. With profits doubling every year, waiting could mean a much higher price.
The Toss IPO is not the only Korean tech listing in limbo. We tracked a similar story in our look at Dunamu’s Nasdaq ambitions.
For foreign investors, Viva Republica is one of the few Korean consumer tech companies with three things at once: dominant reach, fast growth and real profits. Nevertheless, several risks deserve attention.
Regulation. Korean financial regulators move slowly and change their minds often. Toss itself only exists because officials agreed to bend the rules in 2015. A new rule on platform fees or loan comparison could hit its core revenue.
Concentration. Almost all of Toss’s revenue comes from Korea’s 51 million people. Meanwhile, population decline means the domestic market will eventually stop growing.
Competition. Kakao Pay and Naver Pay are backed by Korea’s two largest internet companies. In addition, traditional banks have rebuilt their own apps, and they are far better than they were a decade ago.
Security and trust. A face-payment network holds extremely sensitive data. Toss Bank already faced regulatory scrutiny over an internal IT incident in late 2025. For the wider picture, see our Korean fintech overview. One serious breach could damage the brand quickly.
On the other hand, the upside case is clear. If Face Pay becomes standard at Korean checkouts, and if Apps in Toss becomes the default platform for Korean mini apps, Toss will own both the online and offline wallet. Few companies in any country have achieved that.
Here is the practical part. Toss is one of the most foreigner-friendly finance apps in Korea, and it has worked hard to earn that label.
It speaks your language. The app supports 10 languages, including English, Chinese, Vietnamese, Russian, Thai, Uzbek, Indonesian, Japanese and Khmer. You can switch languages in the settings.
You can start with a passport. According to Toss’s own guide, new arrivals can sign up with a passport even before they have an Alien Registration Card (ARC) or a Korean phone number. At that stage, you can use a prepaid card, make transfers and pay by card.
Full access needs an ARC and phone number. Once you have both, you can unlock the rest of the services, including Toss Bank accounts and Toss Securities.
Sending money home is cheaper. In late 2025, Toss expanded its international remittance service to 50 countries. It also ran a fee-free promotion for foreign residents through June 2026, according to the company. Check the current fees before you send, since promotions change.
Short-term tourists have limited options. Face Pay and most banking features require Korean identity verification. For a short trip, a foreign credit card and a transit card will usually be easier.
A decade ago, sending ₩10,000 to a friend in Korea could take five minutes, three passwords and a security plug-in. Today, a customer in Seongsu can buy coffee with her face.
That leap did not come from a chaebol or a government program. Instead, it came from a dentist who failed eight times, ran down his savings and kept pushing regulators until they changed the rules. The Toss super app now earns more than its biggest rivals and is still growing faster than most of them.
The Nasdaq bell will have to wait. Still, whenever the Toss IPO finally arrives, global investors will meet a company that Koreans already know very well. For many of them, it is the first app they open in the morning.
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