Kakao Brain vs StepFun

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

StepFun has raised more in total funding at $200M, compared to Kakao Brain's $100M — a gap of $100M.

Both Kakao Brain and StepFun share the same Awaira Score of 58/100. The Awaira Score is a composite metric that factors in valuation, total funding raised, company stage, employee count, and market category.

Kakao Brain was founded by Kim Il-doo in 2017. StepFun was founded by Jiang Daxin in 2023. 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. StepFun: StepFun develops multimodal foundation models for Chinese and English language applications, producing the Step series of large language and vision-language models that target enterprise deployment through API and private cloud licensing. The Beijing company was founded by Jiang Daxin, a former senior executive at Baidu, bringing search and large-scale AI infrastructure experience to foundation model development in the rapidly competitive Chinese LLM startup market.\n\nThe company raised approximately $200 million in early funding from Chinese venture capital firms including Hillhouse Capital and other technology-focused investors backing the wave of Chinese foundation model startups that emerged following the launch of ChatGPT. StepFun models are positioned for enterprise customers in finance, legal, and customer service sectors requiring high-quality Chinese language reasoning and instruction following capabilities.\n\nStepFun competes in a crowded Chinese foundation model market alongside Moonshot AI, MiniMax, Zhipu AI, and Baichuan, as well as the AI divisions of Alibaba, Baidu, and ByteDance that have substantially greater compute resources and distribution. The Chinese foundation model market has seen aggressive fundraising and model release activity as the government signals support for domestic AI capability development. Differentiation among Chinese LLM startups is increasingly difficult as model benchmark performance converges, shifting competition toward vertical domain adaptation, inference cost, and enterprise integration services.

Kakao Brain was founded first in 2017, giving it 6 years of additional market experience. StepFun was founded later in 2023. In AI, even a year or two of head start can translate into significantly more training data, customer relationships, and institutional knowledge.

Both Kakao Brain and StepFun 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 StepFun 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.