Information Curation 'Rainer' Secures 11 Billion KRW in Series B Funding

CJ Inve Lead, IBK Industrial Bank New Participation
SL Inve, WeVentures, KB Inve Follow-up Investment

[Asia Economy Reporter Kwangho Lee] Aurum Planet, the service provider of the hyper-personalized information curation platform LINER, announced on the 16th that it has completed a Series B funding round worth 11 billion KRW.

This round of funding was secured through VC investments and loans from the Korea Technology Finance Corporation. The VC investment was led by CJ Investment, with IBK Industrial Bank joining as a new investor. Additionally, existing investors SL Investment, We Ventures, and KB Investment also participated as follow-up investors.

Aurum Planet previously raised 5 billion KRW through a Series A investment in August 2020, and with the successful Series B funding, it has secured a total cumulative capital of 17 billion KRW.

Starting in 2015 as a highlighting utility, LINER has launched recommendation services, search assistants, and community features, gaining strong popularity among heavy information consumers such as students, researchers, and professionals. Moreover, it demonstrated rapid expansion potential in the global market by growing its monthly active users more than 33 times within one year.

Following this investment, Aurum Planet plans to accelerate the advancement of its product and business as an information curation platform. Currently, it is focusing on usability improvements and innovation in recommendation technology to enable users to automatically receive high-quality, productive content on the LINER platform.

In the second half of the year, the company aims to validate a new business model that allows LINER users to subscribe to curated content on a paid basis. It also plans to expand its business scope into advertising within the information curation platform.

Kyung-sik Kim, Senior Investment Officer at CJ Investment, stated, “We highly evaluated LINER’s potential to occupy the position of a web curator that curates high-quality, productive content in the global market,” adding, “The efficient team structure operating a fast-growing global service with a small number of personnel is also a strength of Aurum Planet.”

Chanmin Woo, CEO of Aurum Planet, said, “Based on this investment, we plan to grow into a global company with products loved by customers and a superior business model,” and added, “We will actively secure talent for research in recommendation and search technologies such as graph-based recommendation systems and search engines.”

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.