Naver makes strategic investment in UVify to build physical-AI swarm drones
What's the deal? South Korean tech giant NaverDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → has made a strategic investment in UVify, a startup specialising in autonomous swarm-drone platforms. The two companies have also signed a strategic partnership to develop next-generation drone infrastructure for public safety, smart cities, and industrial applications.
The deal combines UVify's autonomous swarm-flight technology with Naver's AI, cloud, and digital twin capabilities. Together, they plan to build what they call "physical AI" unmanned systems — where AI perceives real-world data, makes decisions, and translates them into physical actions.
The exact investment amount was not disclosed.
Why now? Demand is growing for drones that can recognise on-site data in real time and make autonomous decisions. Naver has been expanding its physical AI and robotics ambitions, and drones represent a natural extension of that strategy.
UVify, meanwhile, has built serious credentials on the global stage. It holds a Guinness record for the world's largest swarm-drone flight, was the first drone company to receive South Korea's "$10M Export Tower" award, and is the only Korean firm on the board of the Dronecode Foundation, the global body overseeing the PX4 drone operating system.
What could go wrong? Physical AI for drones is still nascent. Regulatory hurdles around autonomous flight — especially in urban and public-safety settings — remain significant in most markets. Translating impressive swarm-flight demos into reliable, revenue-generating commercial deployments is a different challenge entirely.
The signal: Naver's move fits a pattern of Asian tech conglomerates using corporate venture arms to stake out positions in physical AI before the market matures. As a corporate investor, Naver is not just writing a cheque — it is embedding its own AI and cloud stack into UVify's early-growth-stage platform, aiming to lock in a proprietary infrastructure layer for autonomous drone operations across public safety and smart-city verticals.
Read more: edaily.co.kr
