SEOUL, June 09 (AJP) - South Korea’s largest internet company Naver introduced its new investment arm, Naver Ventures, at a networking event on June 5 at the Four Seasons Hotel in Palo Alto.
The announcement marks a renewed push by the company to assert itself in the evolving artificial intelligence landscape — not by chasing the biggest players, but by charting a path rooted in specificity, sovereignty, and strategic restraint.
The initiative was unveiled by Lee Hae-jin, Naver’s founder and newly reinstated chairman, who addressed a crowd of more than 200 Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, engineers, and investors. The event, aptly named Next Chapter, was Lee’s first major public appearance since Line Corp.’s 2016 IPO.
“There have been many waves over the 25 years since Naver was founded, but artificial intelligence feels like a wave on the level of the internet and mobile,” Lee said, framing the recent AI surge — catalyzed by breakthroughs like ChatGPT — as a once-in-a-generation shift.
While conceding that Naver lags behind U.S. and Chinese tech giants in scale and core AI research, Lee was unapologetic about the company’s differentiated strategy. Rather than vying for dominance in general-purpose AI, Naver will concentrate on domain-specific applications where it can exploit proprietary data — particularly in commerce.
“There’s a chance in specific domains,” he said. “Search started out as an algorithm battle, but in the end, it became about differentiation. I think AI will follow a similar trajectory.”
That philosophy is already reflected in Naver’s ecosystem. Through a string of strategic acquisitions and partnerships — including Smart Store in Korea, Line and Yahoo in Japan, Wallapop in Spain, and Poshmark in the United States — Naver has been assembling a data-rich portfolio designed to fuel commerce-centric AI tools.
“When we invested in Poshmark, people may have wondered why Naver entered the secondhand market,” Lee said. “But it was to secure commerce data.”
At the heart of this next phase is Naver Ventures, which will be led by Kim Nam-sun, head of Naver’s Strategic Investment Division. Its first investment: Twelve Labs, a Silicon Valley startup founded in 2021 that specializes in video intelligence.
Known for building multimodal AI systems like Pegasus and Marengo — which can identify and retrieve scenes from video using natural language queries — Twelve Labs has drawn backing from investors such as NVIDIA, Snowflake, and Databricks. Naver now joins them, following earlier support from SK Telecom.
The move is emblematic of Naver’s broader ambition: embedding itself more deeply in the U.S. tech scene, while developing AI that reflects local values, languages, and control structures.
Lee’s message went beyond market positioning. He offered a cultural and philosophical counterpoint to what he sees as the increasing homogenization of global technology platforms.
“Starbucks is a good company that offers consistent drinks everywhere in the world,” he said. “But if Starbucks were the only place selling coffee globally, that would be a bit sad. Each country should have its own tea houses. In the same way, Naver will continue to provide diversity in AI, just as we have in search.”
Lee invoked Naver’s origin story — as a Korean-language search engine built when Western tools failed to surface relevant local content — to argue for “sovereign AI,” an approach that emphasizes local ownership of data and infrastructure.
“One search engine providing all results to the world can be dangerous,” he said. “Korea is different because people can compare Google and Naver. That kind of diversity must be preserved.”
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