Watcha
Building a team where people with responsibility and skills can grow happily under the vision of “creating a pleasant cultural experience through services that know individuals best'.
| Date | Investors | Amount | Round |
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| investor | €0.0 | round | |
| N/A | €0.0 | round | |
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| investor investor investor investor investor | €0.0 | round | |
| investor investor | €0.0 | round | |
* | N/A | KRW60.8b | Series D |
| Total Funding | 000k | ||
Founded in 2011 as Frograms, Inc. by CEO Tae-hoon Park and Alexjihyun Won, Watcha Inc. is a South Korean technology company that originated from Park's interest in personalized services, which he cultivated while attending the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST).
The company initially launched Watcha Pedia (formerly Watcha) in 2012, a content recommendation and rating platform for movies, TV shows, and books. This service utilizes machine learning and user-provided ratings—amassing over 720 million—to offer personalized suggestions. The platform's core function is to predict a user's potential rating for content based on the ratings of others with similar tastes. Watcha Pedia is available for free in Korean, Japanese, and English.
Building on the data and user base from its recommendation engine, Watcha launched its subscription-based over-the-top (OTT) streaming service, WATCHA (formerly Watcha Play), in 2016. The service provides a library of over 100,000 titles, including movies, series, documentaries, and animations, and also produces its own original content. The business model is primarily subscription-based, with different tiers available, but has expanded to include transactional video-on-demand (TVOD) and pay-per-view (PPV) for webtoons to diversify revenue streams.
Watcha has raised a total of $21 million over four funding rounds, with its latest Series C round in 2018 bringing in $12 million. Despite its initial success and expansion into Japan, the company has faced significant financial challenges competing with global giants like Netflix and Disney+. In August 2025, Watcha entered court receivership following a filing by a creditor due to prolonged defaults on bond payments. The court appointed CEO Park Tae-hoon as the administrator to oversee the corporate restructuring, with a rehabilitation plan due by January 2026.
Keywords: Watcha, Watcha Pedia, South Korean streaming, OTT platform, Tae-hoon Park, content recommendation, video on demand, Korean drama, movie streaming, personalized recommendation, Frograms Inc., subscription service, streaming service, webtoon platform, court receivership, corporate restructuring, Alexjihyun Won, KAIST, media technology, Asian content