companies

Naver

South Korea's dominant search and internet company, building the HyperCLOVA X foundation models and the CLOVA X consumer chatbot for the Korean market.

Naver was founded in June 1999 by Lee Hae-jin as a search engine spinout from Samsung SDS and grew into the company that runs Korea's most-used search portal, along with Naver Webtoon, Naver Shopping, and the Line messaging app used across Japan and Southeast Asia. It's publicly traded on the KOSDAQ and run day to day by CEO Choi Soo-yeon, with Lee Hae-jin serving as chairman. In August 2023 Naver launched HyperCLOVA X, a large language model trained on a Korean-language corpus the company says is thousands of times larger than what went into GPT-4's training data, aimed at handling Korean grammar, honorifics, and cultural context more reliably than foreign models. The consumer-facing chatbot built on it, CLOVA X, plugs into Naver's own search, shopping, and travel services. Naver sells HyperCLOVA X to businesses through its CLOVA Studio platform on Naver Cloud, competing for enterprise Korean-language AI contracts against Korean rival Kakao and against Upstage, alongside pressure from global players offering Korean-language support.

Founded

1999

Headquarters

Seongnam, South Korea

Sector

consumer