Blind

Blind was launched in South Korea in 2013 by Teamblind (Korean: 팀블라인드); the company was set up by former Naver colleagues Moon Sung-uk and Jung Young-joon, and Moon later became CEO.⁠[1][2]

Blind was founded in December 2013 by Moon Sung-uk, who had previously worked at Naver and TMON. The company started with six members.⁠[2][3]

Blind was modeled on an internal anonymous message board at Naver that was shut down after complaints about the company surfaced; the app also grew out of Korean workers' wish to communicate anonymously in hierarchical workplaces.⁠[1][4][5]

CNNCNNCNN (Cable News Network) is an Atlanta-based news organization founded by Ted Turner on June 1, 1980, as the world’s first 24-hour television news channel. It has been owned in turn by Turner Broadcasting System, Time Warner, AT&T and Warner Bros. Discovery, became part of Skydance Corporation along with Warner Bros. Discovery in October 2026, and is one of the five networks that rotate in the White House television pool.Open the full entry and TechCrunch have described Kyum Kim as a co-founder of Blind; CNN identified him as chief business officer in 2023, and TechCrunch called him co-founder and general manager in 2021.⁠[4][6][7]

Blind first drew wide attention in December 2014 through the Korean Air “nut rage” incident involving former executive Cho Hyun-ah; early users of the app exposed the incident.⁠[2][8][9]

DCM led an unannounced Series A round in Blind in May 2015 in the “single digit millions”; the app had been founded by former Naver employees and was newly available in the U.S.⁠[5]

Blind formally launched in the U.S. in July 2015, and Uber employees joined that October. Several other sources also date the U.S. entry or global launch to 2015, while another account gives 2014 as the year of the U.S. launch.⁠[10][1][8][11][4]

Users must verify their employer with a work email address to join their company's private channel; in 2018 the public site also required a verified work email but allowed users to chat with people outside their company.⁠[7][4][12]

After former Uber engineer Susan Fowler Rigetti's post went viral in February 2017, Uber employee sign-ups on Blind more than doubled, with about 2,200 Uber employees active on the app; Blind's Alex Shin said Uber had blocked access to Blind on its company WiFi about a week earlier and was the only company to do so, and Uber did not explain why.⁠[10]

In March 2017, Teamblind's co-founder and CEO was Jung Young-joon, and the company was a Seoul-based startup; Blind ran private communities for more than 1,500 Korean companies and was active at about 100 U.S. tech companies. Posts flagged repeatedly as inappropriate could be removed after review, and repeat abusers banned.⁠[9]

Blind raised $6 million in 2017.⁠[13]

In August 2018, Blind had more than 2 million users, including about 43,000 at MicrosoftMicrosoftMicrosoft is a technology company founded by Bill Gates and Paul Allen in 1975 and headquartered in Redmond, Washington, with businesses spanning Windows, Microsoft 365, Azure, enterprise software, artificial intelligence, gaming and devices.Open the full entry, 28,000 at Amazon and 10,000 at Google, and in South Korea half of all employees at companies with more than 200 people were monthly active users. Blind was then available only in the U.S. and South Korea, with customers in traditional industries including Johnson & Johnson, Dow Chemical, BarclaysBarclaysBarclays is a banking and financial services group headquartered in London, United Kingdom, with Barclays PLC as its parent company. It traces its origins to a London goldsmith bank established in 1690 and developed through bank mergers, overseas expansion and investment banking reorganisations. Its businesses span UK retail and corporate banking, private banking and wealth management, global investment banking and US consumer banking.Open the full entry and the U.S. Navy.⁠[7]

Blind launched a #MeToo channel in 2018. In September 2018 Blind added an “HR Issues” topic that let users post without showing their company name, and a Blind survey of more than 11,000 tech workers found 31% had witnessed or experienced sexual harassment and 70% did not trust HR.⁠[4][8]

Blind raised $10 million in November 2018. In December 2018, HR Dive named Blind “Innovator of the Year” in its Dive Awards 2018, saying users from more than 70,000 companies had created accounts.⁠[13][8]

On December 20, 2018, it was disclosed that security researcher Mossab H had found an ElasticSearch database server at Blind left without a password, exposing a real-time stream of user logins, posts, comments and unencrypted private messages; some records held plain-text email addresses, passwords were stored as MD5 hashes, and login records contained account access tokens.⁠[13]

Blind said the exposure affected users who signed up or logged in between November 1 and December 19, 2018, an estimated 10% of its user base; Blind pulled the database only after a follow-up email about a week later. Blind said the data had been moved to a test environment, and Kyum Kim said there was “no evidence” of misuse and denied that Blind used MD5 to store passwords.⁠[13][14]

Blind said it noticed “a surge in verification failure” among Tesla employees from May 4, 2019, with Tesla blocking the work-email verification messages needed to join its community and employees reporting that Blind was blocked on company WiFi. A Blind spokesperson said: “Tesla is the only company that is blocking its own employees from accessing or signing up on Blind.” Tesla did not respond at the time.⁠[15]

In March 2021, a suspected employee of Korea Land and Housing Corporation (LH) posted on Blind mocking the land-speculation probe, and Prime Minister Chung Sye-kyun said the author would be held accountable. Blind encrypts work emails immediately after verification and severs the link between account and email, holds a patent on this anonymization, and therefore cannot itself identify posters.⁠[2]

A Teamblind spokesperson said that even if it wanted to cooperate on individual cases, “the system has limits,” and that checking a disputed account “conflicts with the service's principles.” Blind had about 3.2 million users in Korea and 1.2 million in the U.S. as of the end of February 2021.⁠[2]

A Blind pop-up poll launched on March 27, 2021, among 3,050 users found that 35% would quit if working from home ended and 54% would not; among Amazon respondents the share saying they would quit was 43%.⁠[16]

In May 2021, Teamblind announced a $37 million Series C round led by Korean venture firm Mainstreet Investment, with new investors Cisco Investments and Temasek's Pavilion Capital and existing backers DCM Ventures and Storm Ventures; the company said the funds would accelerate a Nasdaq listing originally planned for 2025.⁠[17][3][6]

At the time Blind had more than 5 million users, 1.5 million in the U.S. and 3.5 million in Korea; CEO Moon Sung-uk said the company had established its headquarters in Silicon Valley “with a global business in mind” and planned bases in Canada and India. The company had more than 100 employees.⁠[17][3]

Blind was experimenting with two revenue products, employee-sentiment insights for HR teams and “Talent by Blind,” which passes users' career intent to recruiters, and Young Yuk, previously in senior product roles at Intuit, Yelp and Glassdoor, had joined as chief product officer. Kyum Kim said: “People are just more honest on our platform versus these company-sponsored channels.”⁠[6]

Blind's worldwide registered users had grown from about 3 million in March 2020 to more than 7 million, and its main office was in San Francisco; in Korea, more than 8 in 10 white-collar professionals used Blind, including 90% or more of employees at the top 1,400 companies, and more than 200,000 users worked in the public sector. In November 2020 the company launched Bleet, a dating app for Korean users limited to verified office workers.⁠[1]

About 6,000 Microsoft employees signed up for Blind between January 13 and 18, 2023, and more than 1,000 Google employees joined within 24 hours of Google's layoff announcement; Blind created a “#ReadyForWork” account type for laid-off workers without a work email, giving access to public forums but not private company channels. The company said it had more than 7 million verified professionals from more than 300,000 companies and had raised more than $60 million.⁠[4]

CNN noted a tension in Blind offering workers an anonymous space while selling services such as Talent By Blind and Insights By Blind to the companies they discuss; companies using Insights By Blind included Cisco, Gopuff, Roblox and Salesforce.⁠[4]

In February 2023, Teamblind revamped its recruitment app blind Hire so that any Blind user could view job posts, targeting passive job seekers; the company said nearly 90% of employees at Korea's top 1,000 companies used Blind and monthly active users were estimated at more than 5 million.⁠[11]

Blind was named to Time's 2023 Time100 Most Influential Companies list in the “Pioneers” category; at the time Blind served 9 million professionals worldwide and was headquartered in Silicon Valley, California.⁠[18]

Blind data based on users' self-reported compensation from January 2022 to August 2023 showed average total compensation for entry-level software engineers of $179,000 at MetaMetaMeta (Meta Platforms, Inc.) is a publicly listed American technology company, renamed from Facebook in 2021, that operates social communication, digital advertising, virtual reality, smart glasses and artificial intelligence businesses.Open the full entry, $184,000 at Google, $141,000 at Microsoft and $142,000 at Apple.⁠[19]

After Amazon announced an increase in required office attendance from three to five days a week, a Blind survey of 2,585 verified Amazon corporate employees conducted September 17–19 found 91% dissatisfied and 73% considering looking for another job; the survey was not scientific.⁠[20]

In December 2025 Blind described on its official blog a LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry verification feature letting former employees, laid-off workers and job seekers verify accounts without a company email, appearing as “Ex-Employee.” The LinkedIn profile must be fully public, list work experience and have more than 50 connections, and such users cannot post or comment in former employers' private channels; Blind says it does not store their personal information.⁠[21][22]

A Blind survey of 1,552 India-based professionals in July 2026 found that 66% of AI/ML workers expected layoffs or significant headcount reductions in their teams within three to six months, while 24% of engineers called layoffs “very likely,” the lowest of any function.⁠[23]

On Apple's App Store, developer Teamblind Inc. lists the app as “Blind - Professional Community” and states that it has been joined by “over 10 million professionals.”⁠[24]

Blind: Official website: https://www.teamblind.com/ (opens in a new window)⁠[24]

Blind: Apple App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/blind-professional-community/id737534965 (opens in a new window)⁠[24]

Blind: Help center: https://help.teamblind.com/ (opens in a new window)⁠[22]