Kakao Brain vs Silo AI

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

Kakao Brain has raised more in total funding at $100M, compared to Silo AI's $60M — a gap of $40M.

Silo AI holds the higher Awaira Score at 60/100, compared to Kakao Brain's 58/100. The Awaira Score is a composite metric factoring in valuation, funding, stage, team size, and market presence — a 2-point gap that reflects meaningful differences in scale or traction.

Kakao Brain was founded by Kim Il-doo in 2017. Silo AI was founded by Peter Sarlin in 2017. Visit each company's profile on Awaira for a full founder biography.

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. Silo AI: Silo AI operated as a private European AI lab providing foundation model development, applied AI research, and AI product engineering services to enterprise clients across Europe, building custom AI systems and adapting open-source foundation models for domain-specific applications in manufacturing, healthcare, and financial services. The Helsinki company combined academic research partnerships with commercial AI deployment expertise.\n\nThe company raised approximately $60 million in venture funding before being acquired by AMD in July 2024 for approximately $665 million, one of the largest acquisitions of a European AI company. The acquisition gave AMD an AI software engineering team to develop AI software and tools optimised for AMD Instinct GPU hardware, addressing the critical software ecosystem gap that AMD faces in competing against NVIDIA CUDA in the AI training and inference market.\n\nSilo AI competed in the European AI services and research market alongside AI labs and consultancies, but its acquisition by AMD represented a strategic uplift from commercial AI services to chip ecosystem development. The acquisition price reflected AMD valuation of Silo AI engineering talent and AI model optimisation expertise rather than its revenue run rate, indicating the premium that semiconductor companies are willing to pay to close software ecosystem gaps against NVIDIA dominance. Post-acquisition, the Silo AI team focuses on optimising AI frameworks, model libraries, and developer tools for AMD AI accelerator hardware.

Both Kakao Brain and Silo AI were founded in the same year — 2017. Despite sharing a founding year, they may have launched at different times within that year, which can matter in fast-moving AI markets.

Both Kakao Brain and Silo AI 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, Kakao Brain and Silo AI 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.