About

Why This Exists

"I once held 51% of a company with $35 million in annual revenue. My control over its management was zero."

The Apex G-Score wasn't designed in an academic lab or a consulting firm. It was built by a shareholder who watched governance failures destroy value from the inside — not once, but repeatedly, across multiple companies.

As a controlling and minority shareholder in both listed and private Korean companies, I exercised shareholder rights extensively — filing proposals, challenging boards, reading audit reports line by line. Over years of direct engagement, I learned where governance actually breaks down — not in theory, but in practice. The patterns were consistent: companies that disclosed everything but concentrated all decision-making power in a few hands. Boards that existed on paper but never exercised independent judgment. Related-party transactions that were individually legal but collectively extractive.

Existing governance ratings couldn't see any of this. They measured whether institutions existed, not whether they worked. The Apex G-Score was built to measure what they missed.

Founder
Yunjung (Michelle) You
Yunjung (Michelle) You, Ph.D.
Founder & Chief Architect

Yunjung (Michelle) You is a governance researcher and analyst who designs data-driven methodologies for evaluating corporate governance structures. As a significant shareholder — both minority and controlling — across multiple listed and private Korean companies, she has exercised shareholder rights extensively, filed shareholder proposals, and observed firsthand the governance risks unique to the Korean capital market: the wedge between ownership and control, board-centric decision-making structures, and the structural opacity of related-party transactions.

Her research focuses on how board decision-making patterns and related-party structures — dynamics that do not appear on financial statements — affect corporate value and capital allocation. Combining her understanding of Korean commercial law with quantitative data analysis, she designed the Apex G-Score™ — a rule-based evaluation framework built not on theoretical hypotheses, but on public data and repeatedly observed governance patterns.

She currently publishes independent, standards-based corporate governance analysis through Apex Governance LLC, incorporated in Delaware, USA.

Selected Background

"Profits are proven by numbers.
But a shareholder's share is determined by governance."

Team

Advisory Board

Wonsang You
Wonsang You, Ph.D.
AI, Data Science & Quantitative Methods Advisor
Wonsang You is an AI researcher and data scientist whose career spans neural network modeling, biomedical imaging, and large-scale data pipeline design. He holds a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering (Neural Networks) from Otto von Guericke University of Magdeburg and an M.S. in Engineering (AI & Image Processing) from KAIST. He spent six years at Children's National Hospital in Washington, DC as a Staff Scientist, developing deep learning tools for fetal brain imaging, after earlier research on brain functional networks at the Leibniz Institute for Neurobiology in Germany. He began his career as an R&D engineer at Hanwha Aerospace before moving into academic research. He currently serves as Associate Professor of Data Science at Dongduk Women's University in Seoul, following five years on the faculty at Sun Moon University.
Advises Apex Governance on the full technical stack underlying the G-Score: AI-powered data collection and processing architecture from DART, scoring pipeline design and quality assurance, statistical validation methodology for backtesting across multiple independent periods, cross-validation framework design, and quantitative calibration of the TBR axis weights. His background in building reproducible AI and machine learning pipelines for large-scale data — first in biomedical research, now in financial data science — directly shapes how the G-Score system processes, validates, and delivers governance data at scale.
Company

Apex Governance LLC

Incorporated in Delaware, USA. Apex Governance quantitatively scores the governance of Korean listed companies using only public regulatory filings — enabling investors to see the power structures and conflict-of-interest risks hidden behind the disclosures.