NAVER Ventures has made a new investment in U.S.-based AI inference chip startup Positron AI. The investment arm of South Korean internet company NAVER is stepping up its search for later-stage startups in North America, following investments in companies including TwelveLabs and ElevenLabs.
According to NAVER on Sept. 14, NAVER Ventures joined Positron AI's $875 million Series C funding round earlier this month alongside a group of global investors. The round is valued at approximately 1.44 trillion KRW.
Positron AI is a U.S. startup developing semiconductor and hardware technologies designed to improve the speed and energy efficiency of AI inference—the stage in which a trained AI model generates responses or makes predictions.
The company is developing technologies aimed at lowering the cost and power consumption of AI inference without relying on high-bandwidth memory, or HBM. Its products include the Atlas AI inference system, while its next-generation inference chip, Asimov, is currently under development.
Positron AI has drawn growing attention as AI inference costs increasingly outpace training costs across the industry. NAVER Ventures said the company is valued at about $5 billion, or roughly 6.73 trillion KRW.
That represents an approximately fivefold increase in seven months from its $1 billion valuation—about 1.35 trillion KRW—when it raised its Series B round in February.
“Positron's approach is to design next-generation silicon without depending on HBM or advanced packaging,” NAVER Ventures said. “The company is building inference accelerators for frontier AI models using widely available LPDDR5X memory.”
NAVER Ventures, now about one year and three months into its operations, is increasing efforts to identify competitive startups across North America.
Since launching in June last year, NAVER Ventures has built a portfolio spanning AI, immersive content, fintech and data infrastructure. Its investments include TwelveLabs, a video-understanding and video-search AI company; ElevenLabs, a voice-generation, speech-synthesis and conversational AI company; and Baobab Studios, a virtual reality and interactive-content studio.
It has also backed Rain, a stablecoin-based payments infrastructure company; Enhans, an ontology-based AI agent company; VAST Data, which provides data storage and processing infrastructure for AI workloads; and Netomi, an agentic AI company focused on automating customer experiences such as reservations and customer support.
NAVER Ventures has also made indirect investments in generative AI companies including Anthropic, continuing an active global investment strategy.
“NAVER itself began as a startup,” a NAVER representative said. “We will support growth-stage companies with the technological capabilities and experience needed to achieve the next stage of growth.”
“Through NAVER Ventures, which invests in startups across a wide range of countries and sectors, we will continue to stay closely connected to global technology trends,” the representative added.
