NAVER Ventures

NAVER Ventures is the US corporate venture capital arm of NAVER, South Korea's largest internet portal operator. NAVER announced the unit on 8 June 2025, after a networking event its founder and chairman Lee Hae-jin and CEO Choi Soo-yeon hosted in Silicon Valley, and said the subsidiary would finish its establishment later that month. Korean press framed the unit as part of NAVER's push to close the gap with US and Chinese AI model developers, with a mandate to source AI talent and invest in US startups whose technology can feed NAVER's wider AI strategy.

The unit is separate from NAVER D2SF, the company's long-running in-house startup accelerator and early-stage investor in Korea. KED Global described NAVER Ventures as a more aggressive and autonomous vehicle focused exclusively on the US market, while NAVER said it builds on D2SF's record of backing early-stage technology companies and supporting their overseas expansion. Its first announced investment was TwelveLabs, the video understanding AI company.

Its published portfolio is concentrated in AI and AI infrastructure. Alongside TwelveLabs it lists voice generation company ElevenLabs, music generation company Suno, data platform Vast Data, AI chip developer Positron AI, enterprise agent companies Netomi and Enhans, personal assistant startup Instinct, interactive animation studio Baobab Studios and stablecoin card infrastructure company Rain. Several of these are late-stage companies, which suggests the unit writes checks into larger rounds rather than seeding companies, though it has not published a stage policy. The unit pitches founders on NAVER's technology, distribution and partnerships, and on its reach to help companies scale across Asia, where NAVER runs search, commerce, webtoon and cloud businesses. NAVER's 2023 acquisition of US resale marketplace Poshmark gives it an existing American operating base.