Liner closes USD 36.1M Series C for AI research platform

Liner raised USD 36.1M in Series C funding to expand its AI research and agent platform, with LB Investment leading the round and Korea Development Bank, KB Securities, Daishin Securities, STIC Ventures and Helios Private Equity joining as new investors, according to Pulse 2.0. Existing backers InterVest, Atinum Investment and CJ Investment followed on.

The company reports 14 million users and a 500 million-record database underpinning its search and agent products. Liner has split its product line into three verticals: Liner Scholar for academic research, Liner Write for business use, and Liner Finance for investment research.

Liner said its system scored 95.3 on OpenAI's SimpleQA benchmark for factual accuracy and outperformed GPT-4 in search-response generation, per figures the company disclosed alongside the raise. Those are self-reported numbers tied to the funding announcement, not independent evaluations.

The company has framed its growth to date as product-led, with limited paid-marketing spend behind the 14 million user figure. The Series C is positioned as capital for infrastructure and hiring rather than acquisition marketing.

The investor mix

The cap table addition worth noting is Korea Development Bank alongside KB Securities and Daishin Securities. That is a domestic-institutional signal: policy bank plus two brokerage houses backing a Korean AI platform ahead of any public-market path. Helios Private Equity and STIC Ventures round out the growth-stage capital.

The Series C does not disclose a post-money valuation in the source material, and the company has not published a revenue figure or paid-user split against the 14 million top-line user number.

Liner Finance and the buy-side question

The Liner Finance product is the one that maps to INFLXD Media's coverage area. The category, AI research tools aimed at investment analysts, is crowded: AlphaSense, Hebbia, Rogo, Kensho-era FactSet, Perplexity Finance, and a long tail of vertical entrants are all pitching some version of a research copilot. What separates the credible ones from the noise, in our read, is the source stack behind the model, whether the tool cites primary filings and transcripts with paragraph-level attribution, and whether the compliance posture is defensible to an investment committee.

The source announcement does not detail Liner Finance's data sources, transcript coverage, or citation model. Those are the questions a buy-side evaluator would ask before running a pilot.

What to watch: whether Liner discloses a paid-user or ARR figure in the next 12 months, whether Liner Finance ships an enterprise tier with named financial-institution customers, and whether the company files for a Korean listing on the back of the KDB/KB Securities relationship.