Jeongsoo Song CEO
Rewriting the kitchen standard — in five years, it will start from the standard Li.fizz built
Rewriting the kitchen standard — in five years, it will start from the standard Li.fizz built
“Will Korean kitchens look the same in five years? They won't. And being at the heart of that change is a rare experience.”
Q. Could you introduce yourself?
Hi, I'm Jeongsu Song, CEO of Li.fizz. I've loved building and coding things since I was a kid. I went to a science high school, studied electronic engineering at Hanyang University, and worked at InBody's Future Research Lab, then as CTO at Lualab, and as product development lead at Rabino before starting Li.fizz. A fun fact — I'm also a licensed bartender, and I still pick up unpaid shifts at our partner stores or show up at robot installation sites myself. There's just so much you can't see from behind a desk. (laughs)
Q. What do you do at Li.fizz?
My job is to define the problems Li.fizz needs to solve, and decide how we're going to solve them. Honestly, that's most of what I do. How important is the problem? How free of preconceptions can we be in looking at it? How good is the way we're solving it? Those three things end up shaping the direction of the company.
That's why I think it's so important to get down to the customer's eye level. My logic at the desk is worse than a customer interview, and a customer interview is worse than actually becoming the customer myself. Knowing something in your head and knowing it in your body lead to completely different decisions.
In the early days I did pretty much everything — building, selling, servicing, fundraising. Now it boils down to three things: defining the problems we'll solve together, gathering the people to solve them with, and bringing in the money to solve them with. Those three. (laughs)
Q. I'm curious how you came to found Li.fizz.
Honestly, it didn't start with "kitchen automation." I originally wanted to do pure physics or science. I loved the idea that scientific progress helps the world. What pulled me toward starting a company was the realization that entrepreneurship has the same spirit but can create impact much faster.
I think a startup needs two conditions to work. The market has to already be big enough, and it has to be legacy enough that there's real room for technology to make it more efficient. I was looking for a place where those two lined up. Korea's small-business market was exactly that. More than 50% of operating costs go to labor — over half. And 25% of these businesses close every year. Yet adoption of automation robotics was almost nothing. "This is obviously a problem worth solving — so why hasn't anyone solved it properly?"
When I worked through it, the answer was cloud robotics. Instead of putting one big, expensive robot into a store, you put smaller, cheaper robots in and connect them through the cloud so they collaborate. That's the direction Li.fizz is going.
Q. Stores grew explosively in just one year. What moment stands out the most?
When Pulmuone deployed our bartender robot at the Sky Hub Lounge in Incheon International Airport. When we first walked into that meeting, the vibe was very much "you want to put a startup's product in an airport lounge?" But once they saw the demo, it flipped immediately to "let's get it installed." That deployment mattered because Pulmuone — a proven operator — was running our robot 24/7 nonstop, and we proved out reliability in that environment. After that, we rolled out across resorts, golf courses, hotels, and buffet franchises like Qoo Qoo. We're now past 1,400 cumulative deployments.
Q. There must be real hardships in being CEO.
The job is solving problems that have no right answer, every single day. You can't Google it. It's not in any book. We're making it up as we go. Every decision ends up on my shoulders, and the weight of knowing that a single call could make or break the company is always there.
Thankfully, I have people who own each domain. Soohyun Kwon, our COO and co-founder, leads operations and food R&D. Kyungpyo Heo, our CTO, owns product architecture and technical strategy. Minsoo Kang, our development lead, drives the technical implementation of our products. Junsang Lim, our manager, bridges the field and our strategy. Professor Dongjin Lee serves as our technical advisor and reviews our core technology decisions with us. Everyone holds their post quietly and reliably. That's what keeps me going with the sense that I'm not in this alone.
Q. Who would you like to work with?
Three things.
Smart, with great attitude. Companies move fastest when you work with people who have both. I've seen plenty of people with one or the other, but having both together is rarer than you'd think.
Data-driven in their decision-making. When you rely only on experience and gut, a mistake always finds its way in somewhere. The people who question their own intuition and validate it with numbers tend to make better decisions in the end.
And finally, people with the mindset to understand customers in the field. Even some really capable people get trapped in their numbers and their own logic. But data is, in the end, a lagging indicator — it's an interpretation of what already happened. So I think interviews, sales, customer experience — that kind of fieldwork is just as important as data. I'm looking for people who are willing to do that work, even when it gets hard.
Q. Any last words you'd like to share?
Our ultimate goal is simple. We want store owners to say, "How did we ever do this without Li.fizz?" The owner who used to work until dawn now has time to have dinner with their family — and can spend that time on something more valuable, like growing the business. That's the picture we're drawing.
Five years from now, the kitchens of the world will not look like they do today. And I'm certain Li.fizz will be at the center of that change. We build hypotheses, test them, and rewrite them — every single day. If you're someone who wants to walk this road with us, you're always welcome.