Diana Seo — Founder of Oriya

Writing — a working ledger

A ledger of non-consensus bets — from early crypto and cross-border fintech to building in AI today.

Work & track record

Currently building

◇ Oriya

I grew up between three countries and as many healthcare systems, none of which agreed with each other. Then I did the thing everyone recommends and bought the wearables — and ended up with five dashboards, four scores, and no read on what any of them actually wanted from me. A bad number could quietly cost me a morning. That's the problem I build against.

One fair 0–100 recovery score to compete on — how well you recovered, not whose device runs generous.

Oriya normalizes Oura, Garmin, Whoop, and Apple onto that single index. Private beta in SF & NYC; the long arc is health data you own.

Visit Oriya ↗

Diana has been building — and selling — things since she was fifteen: e-commerce, simultaneous interpreting for government events and investor demos, albums of her own classical compositions. She grew up between Guangzhou, Cairo, and Seoul — inside two of the fastest-changing economies on earth — watching who got to participate in that growth and who was quietly routed around it. That question has shaped everything she's built since.

She studied across USC, Bocconi, and HKUST, and passed on the offers that came with them — from JPMorgan, Bloomberg, and Bain — to build instead. She's worked both sides of the table since: an early hand on growth and product across a run of hard fintech and web3 companies — VegaX Holdings, Solana Pay, Bifrost and BiFi, Demether, Tashi — and inside venture at Nest VC across Hong Kong and Singapore.

She's scaled startups from seed to Series B, and backs founders building where most funds don't look — Accra, Lagos, Vilnius, Bali.

I spent years building the hard version of fintech and web3 — products where the deep-tech problem and the interface were the same problem. I'm bringing that judgment, and the product-and-UX edge that came with it, to a small number of AI startups now: the growth loop that hasn't clicked, the inference bill outrunning the product, the stack one decision from working. If you're teaching yourself into tech, that conversation's free — those I answer first.

my inbox is open ↗