Naver D2SF said on Feb. 5 it has made new investments in AI startups Bandal AI and SynapseAI.

Naver D2SF said it decided to invest in two early-stage startups that are proposing new standards in content licensing and AI workflow, respectively, amid a rapidly advancing AI ecosystem.

Bandal AI is a company that developed an AI-based premium content licensing platform called Cashmere. Cashmere connects premium content publishers and AI companies to support intellectual property protection, revenue diversification and the use of high-quality data. A key feature is that it provides an integrated offering, through an AI-optimized content format called Omnipub, from token-level access controls and permission settings to usage tracking and revenue settlement.

Founded in 2025, Bandal AI has partnerships with global publishers such as John Wiley & Sons and Harvard Business Publishing, and is also working with AI companies such as Perplexity. Naver D2SF, along with Rich Capital and Ingram Content Group, participated in this seed round.

SynapseAI is an intelligence mapping startup that connects suitable AI models in consideration of performance and cost and automatically builds optimized workflows. Synapse Studio, launched earlier this year, supports more than 50 AI models focused on text and images. It plans to expand support to voice, video and 3D in the future.

This investment in SynapseAI, which is made up of personnel from Nvidia and Google Research, is its first institutional funding since its founding. Naver D2SF led the round, joined by Bluepoint, Laguna Investment and the Jogakdol Fund.

Yang Sang-hwan (양상환), head of Naver D2SF, said, "Bandal AI has converted content into AI-native data, and SynapseAI is building an intelligence map that connects AI to AI in the optimal way." He added, "We will find entrepreneurs who propose new standards in a changed environment and support their growth."