NAVER D2SF, NAVER’s in-house corporate venture capital arm, has invested in Cashmere, a data infrastructure platform designed to connect premium content publishers with AI companies in a way that supports licensing, rights protection, and monetization.
Cashmere said its $5 million seed round was led by Reach Capital, with participation from NAVER D2SF, Founders Future, Fortitude Ventures, and Ingram Content Group. The company positions its platform as a bridge between high-quality, authoritative publisher content and AI developers seeking data that goes beyond broadly available web-crawled sources.
At the core of Cashmere’s offering is its proprietary OmniPub infrastructure, which the company says enables token-level access control, rights management, usage tracking, and revenue settlement for premium content. The goal is to let publishers retain control of intellectual property while creating new, diversified revenue streams tied to compliant AI usage.
For AI companies, Cashmere is pitching a path to legally compliant access to scarce, trusted content that can help improve reliability and differentiation of AI services. The company frames this as a way to ground models and AI products in vetted sources rather than unverified information.
Cashmere said it has already partnered with publishers including John Wiley & Sons and Harvard Business Publishing, and that it works with AI companies such as Perplexity. NAVER D2SF said it plans to explore collaboration opportunities between NAVER and Cashmere, pointing to NAVER’s long operating history in search and its broader footprint across commerce, content, fintech, and cloud services.
