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The battleground for generative artificial intelligence (AI) is shifting from developing large language models (LLMs) themselves to building trustworthy 'AI search.' Global tech giants including Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic are competing fiercely, with Perplexity—whose massive investment by NVIDIA has been discussed—also joining the race.
In this intense global AI search battlefield where tech giants stake their futures, a startup is establishing its presence through search accuracy and reliability. Liner, which has secured 14 million global users and expanded its reach, is the key player.
According to investment industry sources on the 27th, Liner recently secured Series C funding totaling 50 billion won. Cumulative funding raised amounts to approximately 94 billion won. This round was led by LB Investment, with existing shareholders including ATNUM Investment and CJ Investment participating. KDB Industrial Bank, Helios Private Equity, KB Securities, Daishin Securities, and Stick Ventures joined as new investors.
Liner operates an AI search and research platform that provides answers with clear sources by precisely searching web and academic materials based on its proprietary search and ranking algorithms. Its main LINE-ups include 'Liner Scholar,' a service specialized for academic research; 'Liner Light' for business use; and 'Liner Finance' for investment research. Currently, Liner has secured 14 million users across more than 220 countries worldwide, including the U.S., Europe, India, and Southeast Asia, with over 80% of its total revenue generated overseas.
Park Ki-ho, CEO of LB Investment who led this round, stated, "Liner is a unique K-AI startup that has proven its results through substantial traffic and data competitiveness on the global stage." He added, "We had full confidence in its future scalability and growth potential, so we led this investment without hesitation."
In this funding round, the core competitiveness that institutional investors focused on most was Liner's unparalleled search accuracy and answer reliability. Liner combines its self-developed search and ranking algorithms with Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and AI agent technologies to explore extensive web and specialized academic data, deriving answers based on verified sources.
Thanks to this technological capability, Liner was introduced as an 'AI Research Copilot' by the U.S. venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and has been listed multiple times in a16z's "Top 100 Global Generative AI Consumer Web Services."
Accuracy metrics were also validated through quantitative data. In OpenAI's factual accuracy evaluation benchmark 'SimpleQA,' Liner's model scored 95.3 points. This significantly outperforms global big tech models such as Perplexity Pro (90.6 points), Gemini 2.0 Flash (84 points), and ChatGPT-4o (38.4 points).
Park (CEO) explained, "The most critical issues in AI search are hallucinations and reliability." He added, "Verification of Liner's reliability has already been completed among professional researchers and students for whom confirming original source texts is essential."
The foundation of this competitiveness lies in Liner's origin: the web service 'Highlighting.' This feature allows users to mark and save important sentences on webpages. Through this process, Liner accumulated data and experience on what information users consider important, successfully expanding into a generative AI search engine.
Park (CEO) evaluated, "Because we expanded search based on a user-centric database, we have accumulated superior know-how in accuracy and reliability compared to competitors who simply combined LLMs with search from the beginning." Kim Kyung-sik, Managing Director at Stick Ventures—a new investor—also explained, "The overwhelmingly vast number of searchable papers and academic databases compared to competitors is a decisive strength."
Liner is focusing intensely on the academic research market based on this massive data. 'Liner Scholar,' its research-specialized service, supports the entire research process—including paper exploration, cross-comparison, citation recommendations, and literature review—based on 500 million academic data points. Leveraging this, Liner targets user groups for whom accurate information and sources are crucial, such as university students and researchers in master's and doctoral programs.
The business scope is recently expanding from B2C (business-to-consumer) to B2B (business-to-business).
A representative achievement is the collaboration with Human, a Saudi state-backed AI company. Liner supplies a deep-research-based AI search engine to Human's integrated platform 'HUMAIN ONE,' where Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman serves as Lee Sa-hoe (Chairman). During its review of technologies to apply to platforms supplied to Saudi government ministries and major companies, Human selected Liner as a partner after comparative verification against global big tech firms.
Park (CEO) emphasized, "While there have been cases where domestic AI companies conducted technology validation (PoC) overseas, actual definitive contracts are extremely rare." He added, "Liner demonstrated both technological capability and system stability throughout Saudi Arabia's rigorous long-term verification process."
The key challenge ahead is securing meaningful revenue scale in B2B business. Managing Director Kim stated, "Currently, achieving profitability itself is less important than acquiring target users and growing revenue and key metrics." He added, "Securing meaningful results in the enterprise B2B market will be the core of a future quantum leap in corporate valuation."
[MoneyToday startup media platform Unicorn Factory]
in FUTURE
