Credit: LinerAI
Liner has raised $36.1M in Series C funding led by LB Investment, bringing total capital to $64.3M. The South Korean AI search startup has 14M registered users across 220 countries and scored 95.3 on OpenAI’s SimpleQA benchmark. Its enterprise push includes integration into HUMAIN ONE, the Saudi government-backed AI platform. Liner focuses on the citation layer between the user’s question and the model’s answer rather than building new foundation models.
Liner, a South Korean AI search startup, has raised $36.1 million in Series C funding as it seeks to turn its consumer research platform used by millions into an enterprise AI business.
LB Investment led the Series C round, joined by returning investors InterVest, Atinum Investment and CJ Investment. New funding participants included Korea Development Bank, KB Securities, Daishin Securities, STIC Ventures and Helios Private Equity. With this financing round, Liner has raised roughly $64.3 million in total capital investment, according to the company.
The round bets that the citation-backed search and retrieval technology behind Liner’s consumer products can also attract corporate and government customers that need AI-generated answers they can inspect and verify.
Founded in South Korea and led by CEO Luke Kim, Liner began as a tool for highlighting and organizing information on the web before evolving into an AI research assistant. Since its previous funding round 22 months ago, Liner has expanded its product portfolio and begun scaling its B2B by introducing specialized agent services. Liner’s current products include Liner Scholar for academic work, Liner Write for business users and Liner Finance for investment research.
Liner is a global AI research company with headquarters in Seoul, South Korea, and a U.S. headquarters in San Francisco. Currently, Liner has 14 million registered users in 220 countries and territories. Liner also says Similarweb placed it 30th globally for AI-service web traffic in late July 2026, ahead of several better-known AI brands. Liner has also appeared in four consecutive editions of Andreessen Horowitz’s ranking of leading consumer generative AI products since 2024.
That consumer reach could differentiate Liner in an increasingly skeptical AI market. Unlike companies developing new foundation models, Liner focuses on the layer between the user’s question and the model generating the answer, finding relevant source material and grounding responses in evidence users can trace.
The latest funding round comes at a time when investors are asking AI companies to show more than user growth and benchmark scores. Liner is not a new AI foundation model but focuses on the layer between the user’s question and the AI model that formulates the answer. Liner searches for relevant source material so AI responses are based on traceable material.
That is an important selling point because generative AI systems can produce inaccurate or unsupported answers, a particularly serious problem when their output informs financial analysis or government decisions. Liner says its system scored 95.3 on OpenAI’s SimpleQA benchmark, which evaluates answers to short, fact-seeking questions, and outperformed GPT-4 in search-response generation.
A benchmark based on short factual questions does not establish enterprise readiness by itself, however. A more consequential test of Liner’s ambitions is its early commercial deployment. Liner’s AI search technology has been integrated into HUMAIN ONE, the enterprise platform developed by AI company HUMAIN, which the Saudi Arabian government backs. Liner claims to have won the engagement after being benchmarked against other global technology providers. The HUMAIN ONE integration gives Liner an important reference deployment in an environment where data control, source quality and explainability matter.
The HUMAIN engagement illustrates the B2B business model the company wants to scale. Consumer AI products are seeing rapid adoption, but they don’t guarantee sustainable revenue because so many free alternatives exist. Enterprise contracts provide larger, more durable revenue streams, but Liner must prove its technology can meet expectations around integration reliability, privacy and support.
Liner plans to use the new Series C funding to invest in R&D and infrastructure, recruit globally and expand its enterprise business in South Korea and other markets. The new focus on B2B sales doesn’t mean the company is abandoning its B2C roots. Liner intends to refine monetization of its consumer offering.
“This investment goes beyond merely expanding our footprint,” Kim said in a statement. “It serves as a strategic foundation to secure world-class infrastructure and top global talent, both of which are essential to anchoring reliability, the ultimate core of any AI agent.”
Liner’s next challenge will be converting its reliability message into repeatable enterprise sales. Its consumer footprint, citation-first product design and HUMAIN deployment give it tangible evidence to support that enterprise pitch. The Series C gives Liner the resources to show whether those assets can add up to a sustainable global AI business.
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Contributed article. Not produced by the TNW newsroom and does not reflect the editorial stance of TNW.
