BorealisAI vs Kakao Brain

Neither company has publicly disclosed a valuation, making a definitive size comparison difficult. BorealisAI employs 100-500 people, while Kakao Brain has 100-500 employees.

Kakao Brain has raised $100M in disclosed funding across 0 known rounds. BorealisAI's funding history is not publicly available.

Kakao Brain holds the higher Awaira Score at 58/100, compared to BorealisAI's 55/100. The Awaira Score is a composite metric factoring in valuation, funding, stage, team size, and market presence — a 3-point gap that reflects meaningful differences in scale or traction.

BorealisAI was founded by Russ Salakhutdinov in 2018. Kakao Brain was founded by Kim Il-doo in 2017. Visit each company's profile on Awaira for a full founder biography.

BorealisAI: Borealis AI is the AI research laboratory of Royal Bank of Canada, conducting fundamental and applied machine learning research with a focus on financial AI applications including time series forecasting, anomaly detection, natural language processing for financial documents, and AI fairness in credit and fraud decision systems. The Toronto-based lab collaborates with academic institutions and publishes research while developing AI capabilities deployed across RBC banking and capital markets operations.\n\nFully funded by Royal Bank of Canada, one of Canada largest financial institutions, Borealis AI operates without external investment, accessing the capital resources and data infrastructure of a tier-one bank for its research programmes. The lab has published extensively in top machine learning venues and developed open-source tools for temporal point processes and probabilistic forecasting that have been adopted by the broader research community.\n\nBorealis AI competes for talent with AI research labs including Vector Institute, Mila, and commercial labs from Google DeepMind and Meta AI that recruit from the same Canadian academic AI talent pool. The RBC affiliation provides access to real financial data at scale that academic labs cannot access, enabling research on problems including financial time series prediction and credit decision fairness that require production-scale data. The lab serves as both a research institution and a talent pipeline for RBC internal AI engineering teams building AI features across the bank retail, wealth management, and capital markets business lines. Kakao Brain: Kakao Brain is the AI research and foundation model division of Kakao Corp, the dominant Korean internet and messaging platform company, developing large language models including KoGPT for Korean language, the Karlo text-to-image generation model, and AI infrastructure for deploying AI capabilities across the Kakao platform ecosystem spanning KakaoTalk messaging, KakaoPay, and Kakao Mobility. The Seongnam company operates as a corporate AI research unit with internal funding from Kakao Corp.\n\nFunded internally through Kakao Corp with estimated investment exceeding $100 million across research infrastructure, compute, and personnel, Kakao Brain develops AI capabilities that are deployed to the KakaoTalk base of over 50 million monthly active users in Korea and across Kakao enterprise and government client deployments. The unit has released open-weight Korean language models through the Hugging Face platform, contributing to the Korean open-source AI ecosystem.\n\nKakao Brain competes in Korean AI research and model deployment with Naver AI, Samsung AI, and LG AI Research, as well as international AI labs whose models must be adapted for Korean language performance. Its integration with KakaoTalk provides a unique distribution mechanism for consumer AI features, as KakaoTalk functions as South Korea primary social communication platform and an essential interface for daily life services from banking to government. The corporate research structure gives Kakao Brain resources and stability but limits the commercial independence and equity-based talent attraction that independent foundation model startups use to recruit researchers.

Kakao Brain was founded first in 2017, giving it 1 year of additional market experience. BorealisAI was founded later in 2018. In AI, even a year or two of head start can translate into significantly more training data, customer relationships, and institutional knowledge.

Both BorealisAI and Kakao Brain report similar employee counts of approximately 100-500. Team size is often a proxy for operational scale, though lean AI companies can punch well above their headcount.

Yes, BorealisAI and Kakao Brain are direct competitors — both operate in the Foundation Models space and likely target overlapping customer segments. This comparison is especially relevant for buyers evaluating both platforms.