Andrew Lee

Andrew Lee was born in Indianapolis and raised in Carmel, a city in the Indianapolis metro area. He is the son of Jay Lee, a South Korean immigrant that was born in Jeonju. Lee states that his parents "had nearly nothing when they came to the United States" and made sacrifices for him and his brother. He enrolled in Purdue University and transferred to the University at Buffalo, but later dropped out to start working.

In 2009, Lee founded London Trust Media (LTM), a private holdings company. In 2010, he founded Private Internet Access (PIA), a virtual private network service for anonymizing Internet traffic. He claimed to have started PIA because of his interest in Internet Relay Chat (IRC), whose users' IP addresses could be easily revealed, but only after the Freenode purchase. Lee and co-owner Steve DeProspero sold LTM (and its subsidiary PIA) to Israeli company Kape Technologies for US$95.5 million in November 2019. Lee co-founded Mt. Gox Live, a bitcoin price tracker that was later acquired by the now-defunct bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox.

In 2017, Christel Dahlskjaer, then the head of staff at Freenode, incorporated and transferred ownership of Freenode Limited to Lee; Dahlskjaer and Lee said the company was solely for funding the network and running the Freenode #live conferences. According to staff, they were not informed of the contents of the deal and were told that it would not affect Freenode's day-to-day operations, as the company only managed the conference and nothing else. A dispute over changes Lee imposed in 2021 resulted in all of Freenode's 20 to 30 staff members resigning. This team went on to form a new network called Libera Chat.

In present day, Lee's holding company, Imperial Family Companies, continues to own Freenode, Legacy Fighting Alliance, Chime TV and others.

On 27 July 2025, Andrew Lee launched a new VPN service called VP.net.

In 2020, Lee and his family moved to a mansion in Hidden Valley, Ventura County, California.

In the afternoon of 18 November 2022, J-Money, driving a Rolls-Royce Phantom registered to Andrew Lee, was shot and robbed by two men in Koreatown, Los Angeles. As of February 2023, the perpetrators have not been identified. Andrew Lee has collaborated with J-Money on multiple occasions, including an appearance on J-Money's album titled "Dun It All".

As of 2026, Lee identifies as Christian.