Liner
Category: AI in Productivity
An AI-powered research platform that helps users highlight, organize, and get insights from web pages and PDFs, designed to provide reliable, citable sources. Liner was founded in 2015. The company is led by Jinu Kim. Based in Seoul, South Korea. Team size: 51-200. Total funding raised: $36.4M. Latest round: Series B, $29.0M, 2024-10, led by Intervest and Atinum Investment. Key investors include ["Intervest","Atinum Investment","Samsung Venture Investment","LB Investment","Naver","KB Investment","TBT Partners","SpringCamp"].
- Founded
- 2015
- Headquarters
- Seoul, South Korea
- Team size
- 51-200
- Total funding
- $36.4M
Value proposition
Liner transforms the web into a personal knowledge base by allowing users to highlight text, get AI-powered summaries, and receive personalized content recommendations, helping users find reliable information faster.
Products and solutions
["Liner Highlighter (browser extension for Chrome, Safari, Edge)","Liner for Mobile (iOS and Android apps)","Liner AI Copilot (integrates with search results to provide summaries and related questions)","Liner AI Workspace (a dashboard to manage all highlights, notes, and conduct AI-powered searches)"]
Unique value
Liner's primary innovation lies in its seamless integration of a web/PDF highlighter with a proprietary generative AI assistant. This combination allows users to not only save information but also interact with it in real-time to get summaries and answers without leaving the page.
Target customer
Students, researchers, and professionals who need to process large amounts of online information efficiently and find trustworthy, citable sources.
Industries served
["Education","Research","Professional Services","General Productivity"]
Technology advantage
The core advantage is the vast dataset of user-generated highlights, which trains their AI to understand which information is most valuable on any given webpage. This creates a powerful recommendation engine and improves the AI copilot's relevance. The company has also fine-tuned its own model, 'Liner 7B', based on Llama 3.
How they differentiate
Liner differentiates by focusing on the point of information consumption—the browser itself. While competitors focus on post-reading organization or collaborative annotation, Liner provides an in-context AI assistant for immediate summarization and insight, making the research process faster. Its AI is also trained on a massive dataset of human highlights to determine what is most valuable.
Main competitors
["Readwise","Hypothesis","Mem.ai","Perplexity AI","Weava"]
Key partnerships
["Integrations with major browsers (Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Safari) and featured placements on their respective web stores.","Strategic partnership with Samsung.","Collaborations with ThetaLabs and Tako."]
Notable customers
["Primarily a B2C and Prosumer focus. Notable user concentrations at major universities including the University of Southern California, University of Michigan, UC-Berkeley, New York University, and Texas A&M."]
Major milestones
["Reached 10 million registered users.","Completed a ~$29M Series B funding round in October 2024.","Selected as 'App of the Day' on the Apple App Store.","Featured prominently on the Google Chrome Web Store.","Successful launch and integration of the Liner AI Copilot into mainstream search engines for its users."]
Growth metrics
Over 10 million users across 200+ countries. Consistently featured as a top productivity app on the Chrome Web Store and Apple App Store.
Market positioning
Positioned as an essential AI-powered productivity tool for 'active readers', students, and researchers who need to quickly distill key information from the web.
Geographic focus
Global, with a strong user base in North America, Europe, and East Asia (particularly South Korea and Japan).
Patents and IP
Information not publicly available.
About Jinu Kim
Jinu Kim is the founder and CEO of Liner, an AI-powered research platform, a role he has held since January 2015. Prior to Liner, he founded Bapul, a mobile Q&A platform for students, which was acquired by a leading education company in Korea. His entrepreneurial journey began after his studies at Seoul National University.
Official website: https://getliner.com