CLOVA is the artificial intelligence brand and research division of NAVER, the South Korean internet giant that operates the country's largest search engine and a wide portfolio of consumer and enterprise services. Rather than being a standalone startup, CLOVA functions as NAVER's in-house AI organisation, developing large language models, speech systems, and vision models that are deployed both inside NAVER's own products and via NAVER Cloud's enterprise platform.
The flagship product is HyperCLOVA X, a family of large language models optimised for Korean, English, Japanese, and Chinese. Released in 2023 as a successor to the original HyperCLOVA, it was trained with roughly 6,500 times more Korean data than GPT-4 and uses a Korean-optimized tokenizer that allows it to run faster and at lower cost than English-centric models on Korean workloads. HyperCLOVA X now supports native multimodality across image, text, and audio, and ships in multiple variants including THINK for reasoning, DASH for low-latency responses, and SEED for open-source applications.
CLOVA's roots go back to NAVER's earlier voice assistant and AI platform work, with the modern CLOVA brand emerging from collaboration between NAVER and its Japanese subsidiary LINE. The team is led by senior researchers and executives within NAVER and NAVER Cloud, and has published extensive technical research on sovereign AI for the Korean market.
As a division of a publicly listed company, CLOVA does not raise venture capital. NAVER as a whole has invested heavily in AI infrastructure, including a dedicated GPU data center in Sejong, South Korea, and an AI research budget that runs into the hundreds of millions of dollars annually. HyperCLOVA X is positioned as the foundation for NAVER's broader sovereign AI strategy for Korea.
HyperCLOVA X powers conversational assistants, search experiences, recommendation systems, business productivity tools, and educational applications across NAVER and partner ecosystems. CLOVA competes globally with OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic but differentiates by deep Korean-language capability, cultural alignment, and integration with NAVER's services.