Naver's startup investment arm D2SF announced Wednesday that it has made a new investment in Clone Labs, an artificial intelligence (AI) startup that predicts user decisions.
Clone Labs is a startup developing a user model that learns patterns of computer and agent usage to predict and execute the next action. Naver D2SF said it decided to invest after recognizing the team's potential to swiftly identify emerging problems arising from the growing use of AI agents and tenaciously pursue experiments to address them.
Clone Labs is developing a "user model," an AI capable of predicting intent and context to make decisions on behalf of users without their intervention. The model learns a user's computer usage patterns and workflow, then predicts and executes the next action at the moment an agent stops. Rather than the existing AI usage approach, which required users to repeatedly explain context and intervene, the company aims to build a new interaction structure in which an AI that has learned a user's behavior and preferences communicates directly with agents.
Specifically, the company has improved accuracy by structuring its model in three stages: "Recording," which logs the user's computer usage patterns; "Memory," which accumulates and analyzes context and preferences during the decision-making process; and "Prediction," in which the AI predicts and executes the next action based on this data. The startup has launched "Clone Desktop" and "Clone Plugin," targeting "AI builders," the group that most actively uses AI agents.
Clone Labs is composed of Seoul National University undergraduates and holds seven research papers on AI agents, including collaborations with Stanford University and Carnegie Mellon University. The team was discovered through Naver D2SF's Campus Tech Startup Competition in the second half of last year, and the investment came three months after incubation began in January.
"As AI technology develops rapidly, new bottlenecks and opportunity markets that were not previously apparent are emerging together," said Yang Sang-hwan, head of Naver D2SF. "Clone Labs is a team that quickly identified the problem that bottlenecks between humans and agents limit productivity, and is solving it in an immersive way based on its high level of research expertise."
