Korean Founder Rebuilt From a Pandemic Setback into REFOUND

From a claims desk to a shuttered restaurant business to a one-PC startup at home, Lee Jung-yong rebuilt around a single idea: document the basis for every repair estimate

Anyang, South Korea, 7th Jul 2026 -- When Lee Jung-yong started REFOUND in 2020, the setup was about as lean as it gets: a business registered at his own home, a single desktop computer and one multifunction printer. The pandemic had just hurt the restaurant brand he had left insurance to build, and he was effectively starting over from nothing. What he brought with him was not capital, but a specific observation from his years reviewing insurance claims -- that the same damage could draw very different repair estimates, and closing that gap was where claims got stuck.

The idea that outlasted a restaurant

Lee spent about three years from 2016 reviewing claims at a major Korean property-and-casualty insurer. His next move was not restoration at all -- he launched a restaurant brand. When the pandemic hit that business hard, the observation he had carried out of his insurance years was still there, and it pointed somewhere specific. The delay in settling a claim, he had come to believe, often had less to do with the repair itself than with the absence of a shared basis for pricing it. If two contractors could look at the same damage and arrive at very different numbers, the negotiation that followed was almost guaranteed to drag.

I had signed off on enough claims to see the pattern, Lee said. The repair work was rarely the hard part. Agreeing on what it should cost, on a basis both sides could trust -- that was where the time went.

Starting over, from a home office

In 2020 he founded REFOUND, a disaster-restoration platform that handles fire, water and flood repair on an outsourced basis for major domestic insurers. The beginning was modest -- the business registered at his home, one desktop and one printer -- but the idea behind it was fixed from the start: document the basis for every estimate. Damaged area, finish materials and work scope are recorded against a consistent framework, and the company uses its own AI analysis tool to keep loss assessment consistent across sites. From that home office, REFOUND has since grown into a platform with a nationwide network of regional sites.

Lee is deliberate about what that tool is meant to do. He describes it as a support aid for the people doing the assessment, not a substitute for them. The goal was never to remove the human from the loop, he said. It was to give them a documented starting point, so the judgment they bring is spent on the hard cases, not on rebuilding the same estimate from scratch every time.

A market that rewards documentation

The timing has worked in the platform's favor. Water-damage incidents in Korea have risen sharply -- the Korea Insurance Development Institute reports a roughly 6.7-fold increase over eight years -- while the Financial Services Commission notes that insurance complaint processing times have roughly doubled in five years. In a dense, apartment-heavy market where a single leak can pull in several households, a documented basis for repair costs has real value.

Now eight years into the industry when his insurer years and his time at REFOUND are combined, Lee frames the work in modest terms. If standardizing the estimate takes even part of the friction out of a claim, that is enough, he said. We are not trying to reinvent restoration. We are trying to make its costs legible.

About REFOUND

REFOUND is a disaster-restoration platform founded in 2020 that handles fire, water and flood restoration through standardized procedures. Headquartered in Anyang, South Korea, with a nationwide network of regional sites, the company performs restoration work on an outsourced basis for major domestic property-and-casualty insurers.

For more information, visit the website at https://refound.kr/

Contact Details

Organization: REFOUND

Contact Person: Jung-yong Lee

Website: https://refound.kr/

Email: Send Email [https://dashboard.kingnewswire.com/release-contact/46862]

City: Anyang

Country: South Korea

Release Id: 07072646862

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