Kakao matters if you want a Korean-built open-weight model for Korean, Japanese and Southeast Asian text, or a read on how the maker of KakaoTalk approaches AI. Its Kanana-2 flagship activates only about a tenth of its weights per token, which keeps serving cost closer to a small model than a large one.
Kakao is a South Korean internet company, listed as KRX: 035720, that runs KakaoTalk and publishes the open-weight Kanana language models. Its Kanana-2 30B-A3B family, updated in January 2026, supports six languages and is licensed for free use in your own services.
Founded: 2006 · HQ: Jeju City, South Korea · Team: 3,992 (2025) · CEO: Chung Shina (CEO) · Funding: Public company (KRX: 035720); not venture-backed
About Kakao
Kakao Corp. is a South Korean internet company headquartered in Jeju City, best known for KakaoTalk, the messaging app that Wikipedia says held about 90% of the domestic market in 2015. Kakao Inc. was founded in 2006 by Kim Beom-su, KakaoTalk launched in March 2010, and the company merged with the portal Daum in 2014 before dropping the Daum name in 2015. It trades on the Korea Exchange as KRX: 035720 and reports a 2025 workforce of 3,992 and revenue of about 8.1 trillion won.
Its AI work sits under the Kanana brand. Kakao's Hugging Face organization lists the Kanana-2 family: 30B-parameter mixture-of-experts models with 3B active parameters in base, instruct and thinking variants, released in December 2025 and updated as the 2601 series on January 14, 2026, plus 1.3B and 3B instruct models added in July 2026. Earlier releases include Kanana-1.5 (a 15.7B-A3B text model and a 3B vision model), the Kanana Safeguard moderation models and a 2.1B embedding model. The flagship open model is Kanana-2 30B-A3B Instruct, covered on its own page.
The weights ship under the Kanana License rather than Apache or MIT. It is royalty-free for building your own service, but reselling access through an API, system-integration or on-premise packages, or on-device embedding needs a separate commercial license from Kakao, as does any company with more than 10 million monthly active users. The license is governed by Korean law with arbitration in Seoul.
Kakao's model cards state that no Kakao user data was used for pre-training or post-training of Kanana-2, a notable line for a company that runs one of Korea's largest consumer data pools. The company publishes engineering write-ups on tech.kakao.com, including a two-part Kanana-2 development series on pre-training and post-training, and lists a Guidelines for Responsible AI that the license incorporates by reference. Technical support for Kanana goes to kanana-llm@kakaocorp.com.
Among Korean peers, Naver with HyperCLOVA X, LG AI Research with K-EXAONE 2.0 and Upstage with Solar Pro 4 are the nearest comparisons; browse Naver's models and Upstage's models next to Kakao's. HokAI files Kakao under big tech in the company directory, and the wider model directory has the global alternatives.
Mission
Kakao, changing your world.
Products
- Kanana-2 30B-A3B (Open-weight language model): https://huggingface.co/kakaocorp/kanana-2-30b-a3b-instruct-2601
- Kanana-1.5 (Open-weight language and vision models): https://huggingface.co/collections/kakaocorp/kanana-15
- Kanana Safeguard (Content moderation models): https://huggingface.co/kakaocorp/kanana-safeguard-8b
- KakaoTalk (Messaging app): https://www.kakaocorp.com
Kakao Models on HokAI
Links
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Kakao a publicly traded company?
Yes. Kakao is listed on the Korea Exchange. Wikipedia, citing the 2025 filings, lists revenue of about 8.1 trillion won and 3,992 employees, with Brian Kim as the largest holder at 13.28%. HokAI leaves valuation blank rather than quote a market price that changes daily.
Which AI models does Kakao release in 2026?
The Kanana family on Hugging Face. The headline releases are the Kanana-2 base, instruct and thinking models, refreshed in January 2026, and the two small Kanana-2 models added in July 2026. Kakao also publishes safety classifiers and a text-embedding model. The weights are free to download, and no per-token price was published on the pages checked.
Can a company use Kanana commercially?
For its own products, yes: the Kanana License is royalty-free for building and running your own service. It requires a separate license from Kakao to resell access through an API or cloud platform, to bundle the model in system-integration or on-premise packages, to embed it in on-device products, or if your company has over 10 million monthly active users.
How does Kakao handle data privacy for its models?
The Kanana-2 model cards say no Kakao user data went into pre-training or post-training. Because the models are open weights, you can run them inside your own environment, so Kakao never sees your prompts. HokAI found no security certification or trust-center page for the models on the pages checked on 2026-10-13, so it lists none.
Who competes with Kakao in Korean AI?
Inside Korea, the nearest rivals are the Naver and Upstage model lines and the EXAONE family from LG. Globally, Kakao benchmarks Kanana-2 against the Qwen3 family in its own tables, where Qwen leads on most knowledge rows while Kanana-2 leads on instruction-following tests such as IFEval and IFBench.