[Exclusive] Naver Cloud and Fortytwo Maru Join Hands... First Investment in HyperClovaX 'Technology Advancement'

Naver Cloud's Strategic Investment in Fortytwomaru in April
HyverclovaX Advancement... Domain-Specialized RAG Collaboration

Naver Cloud has made an external investment to advance its large language model (LLM) ‘HyperCLOVA X’. This is the first time Naver has invested in an external company for technology advancement since launching HyperCLOVA X last year. It is interpreted as a signal to intensify efforts to target the B2B market by enhancing technological capabilities.

Naver CEO Choi Soo-yeon is unveiling the large language model 'Hyper ClovaX' for super-large artificial intelligence (AI) services at the 'Team Naver Conference Dan23' held on the 24th at the Grand InterContinental Seoul Parnas in Gangnam-gu, Seoul. Photo by Kang Jin-hyung aymsdream@

According to industry sources on the 7th, Naver Cloud confirmed that it made a strategic investment last month in the generative AI startup FortyTwoMaru. A Naver Cloud official said, "We will collaborate by expanding business based on HyperCLOVA X or securing clients through FortyTwoMaru’s own technology." A representative from FortyTwoMaru stated, "Based on our generative AI technology, we will cooperate with Naver Cloud to accumulate commercial cases of domain-specialized solutions." The investment amount was not disclosed.

FortyTwoMaru is an AI-based startup developing QA (Question Answering) and TA (Text Analytics) platforms that find a single correct answer from unstructured data. Recently, it attracted attention by successfully raising investments from several domestic companies including LG Uplus and Hancom. Naver Cloud signed a business cooperation agreement for super-large AI with FortyTwoMaru in December last year, and this time proceeded with an investment.

Naver’s decision to collaborate with FortyTwoMaru was largely influenced by the company’s technological capabilities. FortyTwoMaru possesses deep learning-based machine reading comprehension solution ‘MRC42’ and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) solution ‘RAG42’. Among these, Naver Cloud particularly focused on the RAG area necessary for building domain-specialized models based on HyperCLOVA X. When generative AI is trained on existing data, it sometimes fails to reflect the latest information, but RAG compensates for this by enhancing the accuracy and quality of generative AI. FortyTwoMaru’s technology can have a significant impact on designing and implementing solutions and services that specialize the general-purpose LLM HyperCLOVA X for specific industries or domains. Based on their collaboration, the two companies will jointly assign dedicated personnel for technology development and client sales.

Naver Cloud plans to secure competitiveness not only in business-to-business (B2B) but also in business-to-government (B2G) sectors by leveraging advanced generative AI. Naver Cloud is focusing on building the HyperCLOVA X ecosystem. At the end of last month, it announced a new HyperCLOVA X model called ‘Dash’, which allows companies to create customized AI at about one-fifth the cost of the existing model.

Earlier in August last year, Naver announced the establishment of an ‘AI Alliance’ with partner companies related to HyperCLOVA X-based services to expand the super-large AI ecosystem. The investment in FortyTwoMaru, which excels in domain-specialized large language models (LLMs), is also expected to positively impact the B2B business.