Built as an online marketplace for brands, agencies, and models, Spotlite makes casting faster, fairer, and more transparent across borders. The platform helps agencies expand opportunities for their talent beyond local networks without the constant burden of sales outreach, while giving both emerging and established models access to international campaigns and global exposure.
Hannah Choi is the CEO and co-founder of Spotlite Global, a platform protecting creators in the AI era. Spotlite operates on two pillars: a transparent booking platform connecting models and creatives directly with brands across Asia and North America, and IP protection infrastructure that detects unauthorized use of creators’ likenesses and enables consent-based data licensing for AI training.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you started your career, especially one that shaped your leadership approach at your current company?
When generative AI started flowing into the fashion industry, we were one of the sectors people were most worried about. Many investors and industry experts were telling us the same thing: fashion models will be replaced by synthetic ones, so you should pivot to a virtual model platform. It is easier, it is cheaper, and you do not need to grow a real user community.
Benjamin and I had a lot of long conversations about where this company should actually go. And we made a deliberate decision: instead of turning our back on the users who built Spotlite with us and chasing whatever was trendy or sexy at the moment, we asked how we could add value inside this new reality our users were facing. That choice led us to IP protection for models and to consent-based data licensing for AI training. Both of these businesses have, since launch, delivered real revenue and the strongest signal yet from our users about where our brand actually stands.
Trusting our instincts and staying anchored to why we started this business in the first place is the single moment that shaped how I lead today.
What initially brought you to this specific career path, and how did it lead to your role in this company?
I spent most of my early career in the startup industry. I led business development at Hyperconnect, which became one of the largest startup acquisitions in Korean history, and then I worked at an early-stage investment firm. I was never the founder, but I was deeply fascinated by how startups can solve real problems in creative ways. The energy, the pace, the willingness to try things. That is what captured me.
Then one day, Benjamin, now my co-founder, told me about how broken the model industry was. Models could not find good jobs, clients could not easily find the right models, and the whole market sat behind layers of middlemen. He had this Airbnb-style idea of letting everyone connect directly through one trusted platform. I thought it was a great idea with real impact potential for an entire industry, so we teamed up and I came in as CEO. That is the through-line: I followed the founders solving real problems, and then I became one.
What makes your company stand out from competitors in the market? Can you share an example that highlights this?
Spotlite is the only company that connects models to real work, protects their likeness from unauthorized use, and gives them a path to make their image rights more valuable in the AI era, all in one place. Our core is still helping models find the best jobs in the market. But because AI-generated content has made every model dramatically more exposed to misuse of their likeness, we built protection services around them. And for models who want to license their likeness without showing up to a physical shoot, we offer digital booking and digital casting as well.
No competitor covers all three layers, and the reason we do is not strategic design. It is organic evolution. We grew with how the market changed by listening to what our users actually needed and what they were worried about, then building around that. A concrete example: our new AI-powered visual search lets a casting director click a reference photo and instantly find the closest matches across our roster of 12,000 verified models. No more scrolling through thousands of profiles. That is only possible because we built the verified community first.
Are you working on any exciting new products or projects? How do you think this innovation will positively impact your customers?
Two things have me excited right now. The first is our IP protection product. You upload your photo, and we reverse image search the entire internet to find every place your face appears online. We ran a closed beta with 50 users, did more than 15 live interviews, and the findings were sobering: users discovered their faces being used on adult websites where they had never given consent, unauthorized uses long past expired contracts, portfolios they never knew existed, and AI-generated versions of their face being used as fake brand ambassadors. The market need is undeniable.
The second is AI Search inside our model booking marketplace. Clients can drag and drop a reference image, or click images from a Pinterest-style board, and our AI will analyze those references and show the closest-matching profiles from our community of verified models. It collapses what used to be hours of scrolling into seconds.
Together, IP protection and AI Search show all parts of Spotlite working together: a verified community on one side, protected and made more valuable on the other.
What was the tipping point for your company’s recent success? Was there a change in strategy or approach that others might learn from?
The principle I would offer to other founders is this: do not pivot away from your users. Pivot deeper into their evolving problems.
Features are something almost anyone can build very quickly today with AI and modern tooling. They are not a moat. What competitors cannot copy is the network of users who trust you, and the data that compounds only because of that network. If you pivot your business around whatever is hot and abandon the users who built your foundation, you can never compound that trust. We learned this through our own pivot moment.
By staying focused on our users instead of chasing the shiny path, we ended up finding bigger business opportunities than we would have otherwise. IP protection and data licensing both came from going deeper, not from going elsewhere.
Trust and network do not get built in a day or two. They are the real moat, and they are the two things every founder should obsess over.
Can you share a significant challenge your company faced and how you overcame it? What key lesson did that experience provide?
Honestly, we have faced challenges on every front: people, funding, money, product, tech. Basically everything. And if I am being truthful, I would not say we have ever really overcome any of it. It is a never-ending cycle. You get over one problem so you can move on to the next one. The real shift was not solving problems faster. It was becoming okay with the fact that problems are simply the job.
The hardest of them, consistently, has been people. So instead of trying to eliminate people problems, we built infrastructure for them. We codified five cultural principles: Own It, Execution Velocity, Freedive, Customer Obsession, and Sustainable Excellence. We now use that language every day inside the team: “I will own it,” “let me freedive on that,” “that is excellent velocity.”
Once we set those principles in place, the team culture became stronger than it has ever been, and we attract and keep the people who actually fit the way we want to operate. The lesson: you cannot make problems go away, but you can build culture as infrastructure to resolve them faster and attract the right people in the first place.
In just a few words, what differentiates your leadership role from others in the company? What impact does this have on company culture or product success?
I learned from another founder that a startup CEO really only has three jobs. First, mission: be very clear about where the company is going and why. Second, people: hire the right ones and keep them so they can pursue that mission with you. Third, money: bring in the capital that keeps everything running, whether that is fundraising, debt, or any other form.
Honestly, I think of my role more as a job description than a leadership style. Before this, I had never managed a team. I had always been the one doing the work myself, not the one leading others. So after three years, I still cannot tell you what my leadership style is, and I am figuring it out every day.
What I can tell you is that I stay focused on those three things, and so far that has been enough to keep moving forward. The impact, I hope, is a culture where we are honest about not having all the answers, and where everyone is clear on the mission worth pursuing anyway.
Learn more at https://home.spotlite.global/
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