Liner, an AI search engine for students and researchers, has raised $29 million (roughly Rs. 243 crore) from investors including Intervest, Atinum Investment and Samsung Venture as it builds its business in specialized information retrieval.

The biggest and fastest growing market for the Seoul-based AI startup is in the US, where it has 10 million users at universities such as UC Berkeley, Texas A&M and the University of Southern California. The vast majority of its paying users are in higher education, and about two-thirds are in the U.S., Luka founder and CEO Jinu Kim said in an interview.

Liner’s tool, launched last year, aims to be a more reliable artificial intelligence (AI) service than general-purpose ones like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Perplexity’s bots. It narrows its search to credible sources such as academic papers and government databases, and the company has access to a library of scientific journals and publications.

“It’s a new kind of search engine. No junk, only valuable information,” said 33-year-old Kim. The tool works across all academic disciplines, from medicine to engineering, humanities and history.

It uses generative artificial intelligence, the same technology that helped build bots like ChatGPT and Alphabet Inc.’s Google Gemini, by adapting large language models to weigh the validity of information. Students can ask complex questions such as “what are the key literary devices in Hamlet’s soliloquy ‘to be or not to be’ and what is their significance” or “How to calculate heat loss through a wall with material thermal conductivity, thickness and temperature difference.”

The startup has its roots more than a decade ago when Kim and Chanmin Woo were graduate students and created a browser extension to highlight only relevant web search results. When ChatGPT was released in late 2022, they took the opportunity to create a more disciplined chatbot that wouldn’t suffer from hallucinations, Kim said.

Series B investors include LB Investment, as well as existing backers Capstone Partners and SL Investment, the startup said. It has raised a total of $33 million (roughly Rs. 277 crore) so far and is adding to its global team of roughly 40 people with multiple positions in San Francisco.

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