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Naver D2SF has made a new investment in TraceWeave, a startup that developed technology capable of running AI agents even on memory-constrained devices.

According to Naver on the 21st, TraceWeave raised approximately 3 billion won in a seed funding round led by Mirae Asset Capital. During this investment round, the company was valued at roughly 30 billion won, with Naver D2SF participating as an investor.

TraceWeave developed Phase-TITAN, a proprietary AI architecture capable of keeping memory usage constant even as the volume of information to be processed grows longer. Designed as an approach replacing the conventional Transformer structure, the company is building an independent AI model without relying on other open-source models.

In conventional Transformer-based models, key-value caches (KV-Cache) expand as context lengths grow, requiring significantly more memory. In on-device environments such as smartphones, automobiles, and robots, constraints involving memory, battery life, and heat generation have placed limits on deploying AI agents capable of understanding long-term context.

Through Phase-TITAN, TraceWeave focused on easing this memory bottleneck. It enables systems to execute multi-step workflows—such as calling external tools, interpreting results, and deciding subsequent actions—while understanding long context even on constrained devices.

The company also developed an in-house demo demonstrating a multi-step agent running solely on a smartphone's device CPU without cloud calls. In mobility, it completed a paid proof of concept (PoC) analyzing driving data with the autonomous driving affiliate of a global automaker group, and is validating in-vehicle agent performance with a global automotive software company.

Going forward, the startup plans to widen its business footprint into robotics, drones, smart glasses, and wearable devices. TraceWeave was co-founded in October of last year by researchers with backgrounds from ETH Zurich, Google, and KAIST.

Currently, TraceWeave is based at Naver D2SF @Gangnam, and plans to utilize the newly raised funds to recruit talent and expand business operations.

Yang Sang-hwan, head of Naver D2SF, said, "On-device AI is a pivotal technology for deploying complex and sophisticated AI across diverse device environments," adding, "It also provides clear advantages in terms of privacy and cutting cloud call costs."

He added, "TraceWeave is a team innovating AI architecture to overcome the constraints of conventional models and realize AI in on-device environments," emphasizing, "We will continue to actively discover core technologies required for emerging device ecosystems."

                                                                                                          Son Kang-hoon