Liner Raises KRW 50 Billion in Series C Funding, Expands AI Agent Business at Home and Abroad

Liner announced on the 25th that it had raised KRW 50 billion in Series C funding. The latest round came about 1 year and 10 months after its previous fundraising.

Liner said it plans to concentrate the newly secured capital on research and development (R&D) and infrastructure expansion.

LB Investment was the lead investor in the round. Existing major shareholders Atinum Investment and CJ Investment participated in the follow-on investment, while new investors included KDB Korea Development Bank, Helios Private Equity, KB Securities, Daishin Securities, and STIC Ventures.

Liner said existing major shareholders, including early investors and participants in the previous round, maintained their stakes and continued with follow-on investment. The company also said the deal reflected confidence in its technology in the AI agent market and the growth potential of its B2B AI transformation (AX).

Liner said its proprietary agent technology has given it momentum to address hallucination issues and secured global scale-up momentum as well. The company said it scored 95.3 points on OpenAI's factual accuracy benchmark, the 'SimpleQA Benchmark,' and that it has developed its own 'component-based search-specialized LLM.' It added that in an evaluation of AI search answer-generation performance, it outperformed GPT-4o across all eight core components.

Based on such technology, Liner is expanding its lineup of personal productivity agents. It has broadened its service portfolio by operating 'Liner Scholar,' an academic-focused service; 'Liner Lite,' a business service; and 'Liner Finance,' an investment market research service.

Liner's services are currently available in more than 220 countries, including the United States, Europe, India, and Southeast Asia, and it has 14 million users. As of the end of July, Similarweb ranked its global AI service traffic at No. 30. Services in a similar range include Poe (No. 31), Mistral AI (No. 32), and Glean (No. 35).

Liner has been included four years in a row, starting in 2024, in Andreessen Horowitz's 'Top 100 Popular Generative AI Consumer Apps' in the web services category. The company said it is the only Korean AI startup to have made the list four consecutive times.

The company holds user data based on global traffic and more than 500 million academic data points, and it expanded its B2B enterprise business based on those data assets. As an example, it supplied a 'deep research-based AI search engine' to 'Humain One,' the integrated platform of Humain, Saudi Arabia's state-backed AI company.

Liner plans to focus the Series C funding on R&D. It will first allocate resources to advancing core technologies and expanding infrastructure to strengthen its competitiveness in search and agent technologies, while also planning to allocate funds to global talent acquisition, marketing, and business expansion.

Liner is pursuing plans to expand its existing core B2C service business model while also advancing the local optimization of its agent technology. Based on this, the company plans to expand into a 'Mudu-ui AI' service built on locally optimized technology.

At the same time, Liner has also set a policy to secure a foothold in the domestic and overseas enterprise AX markets. Park Ki-ho, CEO of LB Investment, said Liner has technology that can stand alongside global big tech in the AI search and agent sectors, where information accuracy is critical.

Kim Jin-woo, CEO of Liner, said the purpose of the funding was to secure the technology infrastructure and talent needed to support reliability, a core requirement for AI agents. He added that Liner is demonstrating its capabilities and competing with global big tech in the global AI competition, and said the company will continue to take on challenges and grow.

Source: IT DAILY · Yang Seung-gap
Original: https://www.itdaily.kr/news/articleView.html?idxno=241177

References

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