Kakao

Kakao (KRX: 035720) is South Korea's leading internet conglomerate, operator of KakaoTalk (Korea's dominant messaging app). Its AI research arm evolved from Kakao Brain (est. 2017, produced KoGPT and Karlo) which was merged back into Kakao Corp in May 2024, forming the internal Kanana AI organization.

The Kanana model family (EMNLP 2025 Oral) progressed rapidly: Kanana 1.0 (Feb 2025, 2B–32B dense, 3T tokens) introduced depth up-scaling and distillation; Kanana 1.5 (May 2025) added the first MoE variant (15.7B/3B active) with 128K YaRN context; Kanana-2 (Dec 2025, 30B/3B active MoE, 128 experts, MLA attention, 6 languages) achieves MT-Bench 8.42, MATH 86.26, and AIME 2024 78.3 in thinking mode — comparable to Qwen3-30B-A3B. Kanana-o is Korea's first unified multimodal model (text+voice+image), proprietary.

Kakao pursues a dual strategy: own Kanana models plus partnerships with OpenAI (ChatGPT in KakaoTalk, 8M users) and Google (on-device AI, TPU infrastructure). Sold Daum portal to Upstage in Jan 2026 to focus on AI.