From Finance and Law to Founder: “Opening the Door to Arts Investment”

From Finance and Law to Founder: “Opening the Door to Arts Investment”

She built “YEATU,” a cultural-arts investment platform: “We want to connect individual investors with artists”

“I wanted to lower the barrier to investing in films, musicals, and concerts, which only financial institutions and a handful of investors have been able to join.”

That is how Everine Jo, 43, CEO of EverTreasure, explained in an interview on the 19th why she developed YEATU, a cultural-arts investment platform. YEATU is Korea’s first security token platform specialized in artistic content, and it allows investment with small amounts. Last year it successfully raised production funding for projects including the film Seven O’Clock Breakfast Club for the Heartbroken, which premiered at the Busan International Film Festival, and the musical Punk.

Everine has had wide-ranging interests since childhood. Her father worked as a camera director at a broadcasting station, so she grew up close to TV production sites. As a middle schooler, she even appeared in the sitcom Soonpoong Obstetrics Clinic in a small role as a nurse. After entering Sogang University in 2002 to study business administration with a double major in English literature, she began her career in 2007 at Seoul Money Brokerage Services and went on to work mainly at foreign financial firms. While working at a U.S. financial company, she gave up her green card in pursuit of a new challenge, returned to Korea, and joined a theater troupe in Incheon, where she worked as a stage actor. Later, driven by a desire to become a financial-law specialist, she enrolled in Sogang University’s law school and became an attorney in 2020. She then worked in planning and global strategy at companies including Eightpercent, an online peer-to-peer lending firm, and the entertainment company Galaxy Corporation.

Having experienced finance, law, and the content industry, she noticed that artists and production companies struggle to secure the funding they need for their work, while individual investors rarely get the chance to invest directly in films and performances. Seeing the opportunity, she founded EverTreasure in 2023.

“Revitalizing cultural-arts investment requires a tool that can objectively assess the value of a work,” Everine said. “We developed ValQ, an AI solution that automatically analyzes value using more than 50 quantitative variables.”