AI Agent Startup Liner Raises USD 38M in Series C Funding

AI Agent Startup Liner Raises USD 38M in Series C Funding

Global AI agent startup Liner announced on August 25 that it has secured USD 38 million (50 billion won) in Series C funding.

LB Investment led the round, with core existing shareholders including Atinum Investment and CJ Investment participating in follow-on investments. Korea Development Bank, Helios Private Equity, KB Securities, Daishin Securities, and STIC Ventures joined as new investors.

The achievement comes approximately one year and ten months after the previous round, bringing Liner’s cumulative funding to approximately USD 71 million (94 billion won). As the AI industry undergoes rigorous scrutiny, the fact that major existing shareholders from seed investors to previous-round participants maintained or increased their stakes demonstrates investor confidence in Liner’s proprietary technology and growth potential through B2B AX (artificial intelligence transformation).

Liner has secured momentum for global scale-up by overcoming hallucination issues through its proprietary agent technology. The company scored 95.3 points on SimpleQA, OpenAI’s factual accuracy benchmark, achieving world-leading performance. Liner’s internally developed component-based, search-specialized LLM surpassed OpenAI’s GPT-4o across all eight core components in AI search answer generation evaluations.

Building on this technological foundation, Liner has expanded its personal productivity agent lineup by successively launching Liner Scholar for academic research, Liner Lite for business, and Liner Finance for investment market research. The company has built a meaningful user base in global markets without large-scale marketing, a testament to its product-led growth strategy.

Liner currently serves 14 million users across approximately 220 countries, including the United States, Europe, India, and Southeast Asia. As of late July 2026, the company ranked 30th in Similarweb’s global AI service traffic rankings, ahead of Poe (31st), Mistral AI (32nd), and Glean (35th). Liner is also the only Korean AI startup to appear four consecutive times in Andreessen Horowitz’s Top 100 Generative AI Consumer Apps web services category since 2024.

Leveraging user data accumulated through global traffic and approximately 500 million academic data points as assets, Liner has expanded its business model into the B2B enterprise sector. A representative example is supplying its deep research–based AI search engine to Humeyn One, the integrated platform of Humeyn, a Saudi Arabian national AI company chaired by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. Humeyn selected Liner as its final partner after thorough comparison and verification against global big tech companies for core technology to supply to Saudi government ministries and major enterprises.

Liner ranked second among the world’s most innovative education companies in 2026 in Fast Company’s March announcement, and accelerated global expansion through participation in COMEUP 2025, Korea’s largest global startup festival, last December.

Liner plans to concentrate the Series C investment on R&D to solidify its technological edge. The company will prioritize resources for fundamental technology advancement and infrastructure expansion to widen the gap with competitors in search and agent domains, while maintaining balanced allocation for global talent acquisition, marketing, and business expansion. The strategy includes diversifying business models for core B2C services, optimizing globally proven agent technology for the domestic market to broaden adoption as an everyday AI service accessible to all citizens, and concentrating capabilities on successfully establishing itself in domestic and international enterprise AX markets and capturing the ecosystem based on technology credibility.

Keeho Park, CEO of LB Investment, stated, “Liner possesses distinctive technology that allows it to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with global big tech companies in AI search and agent domains where information accuracy is paramount. We led this investment without hesitation because we have confidence that Liner is the one-and-only K-AI startup that has proven itself through actual traffic and results on the world stage, and a company with definite future growth potential.”

Jinwoo Kim, CEO of Liner, said, “This funding round is a strategic foundation for securing the technological infrastructure and talent responsible for reliability, the core of AI agents. Liner is proving its capabilities on the fierce global AI stage and competing head-to-head with world-class big tech companies.”

The global AI productivity tool market continues to expand rapidly, with companies demonstrating technical differentiation and real user traction attracting significant capital. As search accuracy and hallucination control become critical competitive factors, Liner’s validated performance positions the company to scale its enterprise solutions alongside its consumer products.