Naver

NAVER is a South Korean internet company. It began as an in-house venture (a small business team started inside a company) at Samsung SDS and became independent in June 1999 as a company called Naver Com. It was set up by seven founding members, including its founder, Lee Hae-jin. It changed its name to NHN in 2001 and became today's NAVER Corporation in 2013. Its headquarters is in Bundang-gu, Seongnam, Gyeonggi Province. Its shares are listed on the KOSPI market of the Korea Exchange under the code 035420. As of October 2026, its chief executive is Choi Soo-yeon, and Lee Hae-jin returned as chair of the board in March 2025.

At the centre of NAVER is the Naver search portal. In its results for the first quarter of 2026, the company reported its business in three segments: 'NAVER Platform', which combines advertising, such as search advertising, with services such as shopping and memberships; 'Financial Platform', which handles the Npay (Naver Pay) payment service; and 'Global Opportunities', which brings together C2C trading (people buying and selling goods to each other), content such as webtoons, and services for businesses such as cloud. In that quarter, NAVER Platform had the largest revenue of the three. Its subsidiary Webtoon Entertainment was listed on the US Nasdaq market in 2024.

In May 2021, NAVER unveiled HyperCLOVA, a very large AI language model (an AI that understands and produces text) trained on a large amount of Korean-language data. The company said the model has 204 billion parameters (the numbers an AI adjusts as it learns). In August 2023, it introduced the follow-up model HyperCLOVA X, along with CLOVA X, a conversational AI built on it, and Cue:, an AI search service. In April 2025, it made HyperCLOVA X SEED, a lightweight model, available for download. The company called it 'open source', but it uses NAVER's own licence, under which companies with services of more than 10 million monthly users, among others, must ask NAVER for separate permission. In the same year it announced HyperCLOVA X THINK, a reasoning model that works through problems step by step. Its subsidiary NAVER Cloud develops models in the HyperCLOVA X family, and in June 2026, at an academic conference, it presented HyperCLOVA X SEED 4B, a small model for defence use that handles text, images, sound and other kinds of data together.