Liner, a Seoul company that builds AI agents for research, writing and finance, raised a Series C of 50bn won ($36.1m) on 25 August 2026. LB Investment led the round.
Existing investors InterVest, Atinum Investment and CJ Investment followed on. New investors are Korea Development Bank, KB Securities, Daishin Securities, STIC Ventures and Helios Private Equity. Liner did not disclose a valuation or revenue.
“we are focused on establishing a self-sustaining business model”Luke Kim, CEO, Liner
What Liner does
Liner's products include Liner Scholar, Liner Write and Liner Finance. The company says it has more than 14 million registered users in 220 countries and ranked 30th globally in AI service web traffic on Similar Web in late July 2026. It also says it is the only South Korean AI startup on a16z's Top 100 GenAI Consumer Apps list for four consecutive editions since 2024. These are company claims.
Liner says its search engine scored 95.3 on OpenAI's SimpleQA benchmark and draws on an academic database of more than 500 million records. It supplied its deep-research AI search engine to HUMAIN, a Saudi state-backed AI company, for the HUMAIN ONE platform.
Venture Square said Liner ranked ahead of Poe, Mistral AI and Glean in Similar Web's AI service traffic ranking at the end of July 2026, and that HUMAIN ONE is supplied to Saudi government ministries and major enterprises. It said HUMAIN chose Liner as its search engine partner after comparing technologies from global AI companies.
What the money is for
Liner listed research and development, infrastructure, enterprise AI expansion at home and abroad, recruiting global talent, marketing, diversifying its consumer revenue and optimising agents for the Korean market.
Luke Kim, the founder and chief executive, said: "we are focused on establishing a self-sustaining business model", and that the company is prioritising lasting value and technological leadership over short-term, marketing-driven growth.
Venture Square summarised the uses as core search and agent technology, AI infrastructure, recruiting global technical talent, overseas marketing and enterprise business development. It said Liner's enterprise business draws on about 500 million academic records and consumer service data, and that its search-specific model reportedly outperformed GPT-4o on all eight core components of search response generation, a claim that comes from the company.
Who invested
Ki-ho Park, chief executive of LB Investment, said Liner is a one-of-a-kind AI startup already proving its worth through real traffic and commercial milestones, and that the firm invested with strong conviction.
Digital Today, a Korean outlet, quoted the chief executive saying Liner will keep proving its capabilities and compete confidently with global big tech companies.
Venture Square also quoted LB Investment's Park saying Liner has the technological capabilities to compete with global companies in AI search and agents, and Kim saying the investment is a strategic move to secure technical infrastructure and talent.
The funding so far
The Series C came about one year and 10 months after Liner's Series B2 round, according to the company's release. Venture Square reported that Liner's accumulated investment is about 94bn won. The sources did not give the amount of the earlier round, and headcount was not disclosed.
The dollar figure in the headline is the company's own conversion of the won amount.
Company website: liner.com