Naver D2SF said on the 5th that it made new investments in AI startups Bandal AI and CNAPS.AI. The two teams are early corporations poised to present a "new standard" in content licensing and AI workflows in the increasingly advanced AI ecosystem, and D2SF said it decided to invest after seeing their potential to bring change to the market.
Bandal AI developed Cashmere, a premium content licensing platform. It consolidations premium publishers with AI corporations to protect IP while diversifying revenue sources, and it helps AI corporations legally use high-quality data to improve service quality in search, LLMs, and more. With OmniPub, a format optimized for AI, it integrates token-level access control, permission settings, usage tracking, and revenue settlement. Founded in 2025, Bandal AI is expanding partnerships with global publishers and AI corporations, and Rich Capital and Ingram Content Group also joined this seed round.
CNAPS.AI aims for "intelligence mapping," which connects appropriate AI models tailored to purpose and expense/performance and automatically composes workflows. Synapse Studio, launched early this year, supports more than 50 models focused on text and images and reflects the latest models with updates every two weeks. With additional updates, it plans to expand support to voice, video, and 3D. Founded in 2025, CNAPS.AI is made up of talent from Nvidia, Google Research, and global game companies, and D2SF led its first institutional funding since its founding, with Bluepoint, Laguna Investment, and the Pebble Fund participating.
Yang Sang-hwan, head of the Naver D2SF center, said, "Cashmere has converted content into "AI-native data," and CNAPS.AI is building an intelligence map that consolidations and combines AI in the optimal way," and added, "We will discover founders who present new standards and support their growth."