Naver's startup investment arm D2SF said on the 19th that it made a new investment in Clone Labs, an AI startup that predicts user decisions. Clone Labs is a startup developing a user model that learns computer and agent usage patterns to predict and act on the next step. Naver D2SF decided to invest, noting the team's potential to quickly identify new problems arising in the AI era and experiment persistently.
Clone Labs is developing a "User Model," an AI that can predict intent and context and make decisions on the user's behalf without user intervention. It learns users' computer usage patterns and workflows and, at the moment an agent stops, predicts and carries out the next action. Instead of the existing approach where users had to repeatedly explain context and intervene, it aims for a new interaction structure in which AI that has learned the user's behavior and preferences communicates directly with agents.
Specifically, the model improves accuracy by structuring three layered stages: "Recording," which logs users' computer usage patterns; "Memory," which accrues and analyzes context and preferences in the decision-making process; and "Prediction," in which AI predicts and performs the next action based on that. It also strengthens automation quality and stability by automatically performing tasks with high prediction confidence and requesting user confirmation for tasks with low confidence. As its first target product for "AI Builders," the group that most actively uses AI agents, it launched "Clone Desktop" and "Clone plugin."
Clone Labs is composed of former undergraduates from Seoul National University and holds seven research papers on AI agents, including collaborations with Stanford University and Carnegie Mellon University. In particular, it has directly researched and academically addressed the core layers needed to implement a user model, such as Computer-Use Agent (CUA), long-term memory, and privacy-preserving memory architectures.
Meanwhile, Clone Labs was discovered through the Naver D2SF Campus technology startup competition in the second half of 2025. Investment followed three months after incubating began in Jan. 2026. Naver D2SF highly evaluated that Clone Labs demonstrated its growth speed by quickly advancing problem definition, hypothesis design, and product validation in a short period.
Yang Sang-hwan, head of the Naver D2SF Center, said, "The faster AI technology advances, the more new bottlenecks and opportunity markets that previously did not surface emerge," and added, "Clone Labs quickly captured the problem that bottlenecks between people and agents limit productivity, and, based on high research expertise, is tackling it in an immersive way."