Naver is South Korea's dominant internet portal, started by founder Lee Hae-jin and now led by CEO Choi Soo-yeon from the Green Factory campus in Seongnam. Developers building for the Korean market use Naver Cloud's CLOVA Studio to reach HyperCLOVA X instead of retrofitting English-first foundation models.
Naver Corporation, founded in 1999 and headquartered in Seongnam, South Korea, operates Search, Webtoon, Naver Pay and Naver Cloud alongside HyperCLOVA X, its family of Korean-optimized foundation models spanning the reasoning-focused THINK, open-source SEED and lightweight DASH variants built for East Asian languages.
Founded: 1999 · HQ: Seongnam, Gyeonggi, South Korea · Team: 5,000-5,500 · CEO: Choi Soo-yeon · Funding: Public company (KRX: 035420, KOSPI); IPO 2002 on KOSDAQ, transferred to KOSPI in 2008; not venture-backed
About Naver
Naver Corporation was founded on June 2, 1999 by Lee Hae-jin, a former Samsung SDS engineer, as a standalone search portal spun out of Samsung's internal ventures. In 2000 the company merged with Hangame, the online gaming service also founded by Lee, to form NHN Corporation; the combined company split back into two independent public companies in 2013, with Naver Corporation taking over the search, content and platform businesses. Naver is headquartered at the Green Factory campus in Bundang-gu, Seongnam, Gyeonggi Province, South Korea, and now operates as the country's largest internet portal company. Choi Soo-yeon leads Naver as CEO, having risen through the company's Clova AI division before taking the top role.
Naver's core consumer businesses include Naver Search, the dominant search and content portal in South Korea; Naver Webtoon, a global digital comics platform; Naver Pay, its fintech and payments arm; and Naver Cloud Platform, an IaaS, PaaS and SaaS cloud business serving public, financial and government customers. On the AI side, Naver builds the HyperCLOVA X family of foundation models through its CLOVA Studio development platform, which the company says is used by more than 1,000 enterprises and institutions. The family spans HyperCLOVA X THINK, a reasoning model tuned for STEM problem-solving and vision-based instructions; HyperCLOVA X SEED, an open-source line released at 0.5B, 1.5B and 3B parameters, with the 3B SEED variant handling text, image and video input; and HyperCLOVA X DASH, a lightweight model built for fast, high-throughput generative tasks.
In 2025 and 2026 Naver expanded its AI infrastructure through a partnership with NVIDIA, committing to a sovereign AI build-out that starts at 55 megawatts of compute and is planned to scale toward gigawatt-class capacity on NVIDIA's DSX platform. As part of that expansion, Naver has said it is fine-tuning NVIDIA's open Nemotron 3 Ultra model with its own proprietary Korean-language data and training pipeline, rather than training every future model from scratch. The open-sourcing of the HyperCLOVA X SEED line, released for free research and commercial use by domestic developers, was positioned explicitly as a contribution to South Korea's sovereign AI ecosystem: the ability to control AI infrastructure, data and models within the country's own borders.
Naver generates revenue primarily from Search Platform advertising, Commerce (shopping and local business tools), Fintech (Naver Pay), Content (Webtoon and other entertainment properties) and Naver Cloud. The company reported consolidated revenue of KRW 12.04 trillion, roughly USD 10.52 billion, for fiscal year 2025. Cloud and AI services, including CLOVA Studio access to HyperCLOVA X, are sold on a usage basis to enterprise and government customers, separate from the consumer advertising model that funds Naver's search and portal businesses.
Naver Corporation employed roughly 5,047 people on a standalone basis as of 2025, with the wider Naver group of subsidiaries, including Naver Cloud, Naver Webtoon and Snow Corp, employing substantially more. CEO Choi Soo-yeon previously led Naver's Clova AI division before being appointed to the top role, and has driven the company's expansion into AI, robotics, cloud computing and e-commerce. In 2025 she was appointed to the United Nations Global Compact Board, becoming the first Korean member of that advisory body in 17 years.
Naver frames its AI strategy around sovereign AI: building and controlling foundation models, data pipelines and compute infrastructure domestically rather than depending on foreign providers for Korean-language AI capability. HyperCLOVA X is trained with a heavy emphasis on Korean-language and East Asian-language performance, and Naver has published model weights and technical documentation for the open SEED line on Hugging Face under its naver-hyperclovax organization, alongside CLOVA Studio's documentation for the closed THINK and DASH models.
Inside South Korea, HyperCLOVA X's closest rival on Korean-language quality is Upstage's Solar model family; Naver's advantage is distribution, since HyperCLOVA X is embedded directly into Naver's own search, commerce and content products in a way no foreign model is. Globally, Naver has not published independent benchmark comparisons of HyperCLOVA X against frontier models such as GPT, Claude or Gemini, so its standing on general-purpose reasoning and English-language tasks outside Korea remains unverified rather than demonstrated.
Naver's sovereign AI positioning lines up with South Korea's AI Basic Act, the country's framework AI law, which began phased implementation in January 2026 and introduces registration and risk-assessment obligations for high-impact AI systems. Naver Cloud Platform holds ISO/IEC 27001, 27017, 27018, 27701, 22301 and 27799 certifications covering information security, cloud security and personal-data handling, first certified to ISO 27001 in 2010; the company has not published a SOC 2 Type II report.
Mission
Building Korea's sovereign AI ecosystem while connecting people to information through search, content, commerce and cloud.
Products
- Naver Search (Consumer search and content portal): https://www.naver.com
- Naver Webtoon (Digital comics platform): https://www.webtoons.com
- Naver Cloud Platform (IaaS / PaaS / SaaS cloud business): https://www.ncloud.com
- CLOVA Studio (Generative AI development platform): https://www.ncloud.com/product/aiService/clovaStudio
- HyperCLOVA X (Foundation model family (THINK, SEED, DASH)): https://www.navercorp.com/en/tech/hyperclovax
Naver Models on HokAI
Compliance
ISO/IEC 27001, ISO/IEC 27017, ISO/IEC 27018, ISO/IEC 27701, ISO 22301, ISO/IEC 27799
Links
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Naver a publicly traded company and how does it make money?
Naver Corporation trades on South Korea's KOSPI exchange under ticker 035420 and is not venture-funded. The company reported consolidated revenue of KRW 12.04 trillion, about USD 10.52 billion, for 2025, generated mainly through Search Platform advertising, Commerce, Fintech (Naver Pay), Content (Webtoon) and Naver Cloud.
What products and AI models does Naver build in 2026?
Naver operates Naver Search, Naver Webtoon, Naver Pay and Naver Cloud Platform, and develops the HyperCLOVA X family of foundation models through CLOVA Studio, including the reasoning-focused THINK variant, the open-source SEED models at 0.5B to 3B parameters, and the lightweight DASH model for high-throughput tasks.
Does Naver Cloud hold recognized security and compliance certifications?
Naver Cloud Platform holds ISO/IEC 27001, 27017, 27018, 27701, 22301 and 27799 certifications for its cloud infrastructure and personal-data handling, first certified to ISO 27001 in 2010. Naver has not published a SOC 2 Type II report as of this review.
Who competes with Naver in Korea and globally?
Domestically, Upstage's Solar models are Naver's closest rival on Korean-language foundation model quality. Globally, HyperCLOVA X sits alongside OpenAI, Google and Anthropic on general-purpose capability, but Naver has not published independent benchmark comparisons against those labs, so its standing outside Korean-language tasks is unverified.
How do developers start using Naver's HyperCLOVA X models?
Developers sign up for Naver Cloud's CLOVA Studio platform, which the company says more than 1,000 enterprises and institutions already use to build on HyperCLOVA X, or download the open-source HyperCLOVA X SEED weights at 0.5B, 1.5B and 3B parameters directly from Naver's Hugging Face organization for free research and commercial use.