Naver headquarters building. Newsis
Naver D2SF announced on the 26th that it has made a new investment in “F4GE” (pronounced “Forji”), a startup that connects domestic manufacturing plants with global defense and advanced manufacturing companies. Naver D2SF is Naver’s organization for investing in and nurturing technology startups.
F4GE links domestic “root industry” plants such as casting, forging, machining, and mold manufacturing into a single manufacturing network, and supports these plants in entering the supply chains of global defense, aerospace, shipbuilding, and robotics companies. Its core business is connecting the production capabilities of domestic manufacturing sites with overseas demand.
In the global defense and manufacturing markets, recent supply chain restructuring and growing defense demand have made securing stable production capacity a key challenge. As large defense contractors find it difficult to handle all increased procurement needs with their own production facilities alone, demand for securing external manufacturing partners is also growing.
In contrast, there are around 60,000 root industry plants in Korea that form the foundation of manufacturing, including casting, forging, machining, and mold manufacturing. Many possess strong production technology and quality competitiveness, but have faced limitations in entering global supply chains because they do not meet requirements such as documentation systems, quality-control standards, and production traceability demanded by overseas defense contractors.
F4GE plans to address these issues by leveraging software. It applies its proprietary software to existing factories to collect, in real time, on-site data such as equipment operation, production processes, inspection results, and workflow.
The collected data is standardized to formats required by global defense and manufacturing companies. Since each factory differs in equipment type, data formats, and working methods, F4GE organizes these into a single system so overseas clients can verify production and quality-control processes.
Work methods and know-how accumulated by skilled workers through experience are also converted into data. While conventional manufacturing sites often rely on the experience of specific workers to operate processes, F4GE plans to build a separate database from this know-how and use it to enhance consistency and reproducibility in production.
Beyond manufacturing data management, F4GE supports tasks required in actual order intake and production. It matches factories to client orders and provides integrated management from process standardization to logistics, customs, and various documentation.
Through this, domestic factories can satisfy management standards required by global companies without building new large-scale IT systems, according to F4GE. Overseas clients, for their part, can confirm in which factory and by what method products were manufactured, thereby improving supply chain reliability and traceability.
In particular, F4GE is focusing on meeting CoC (Chain of Custody) requirements, a supply chain management standard demanded by bodies such as the U.S. Department of Defense. It manages manufacturing data so that processes from raw material procurement to production, inspection, and delivery can be tracked, thereby helping clients satisfy conditions needed to enter the U.S. defense market.
F4GE is currently expanding partnerships with manufacturing plants in the southeastern industrial belt, including Sacheon, Changwon, and Busan. These regions are densely populated with small and medium-sized manufacturers in sectors such as aerospace, shipbuilding, and machining that can be linked to defense and advanced manufacturing fields.
Overseas, the company is expanding its network with defense, aerospace, shipbuilding, and robotics companies, focusing on North America and Europe. Its goal is to connect domestic manufacturing partners with overseas demand-side companies so that this leads to actual orders and production.
Founded in January this year, F4GE has now attracted its first institutional investment. The investment round included Naver D2SF, KNET Investment Partners, Sazay Partners, D.CAMP, and 500 Global.
F4GE CEO Kwon Hyuk-hyun has experience serving in the Navy Special Warfare Flotilla and founding a defense startup, and has also worked in the United States as a startup investor in AI and manufacturing. Following this investment, F4GE plans to increase its manufacturing engineering and AI development workforce and further expand domestic manufacturing partnerships.
Naver D2SF cited as its investment rationale the potential to turn the production capabilities of Korea’s manufacturing sector into new business opportunities amid mounting production capacity shortages in the global defense and manufacturing markets.
Yang Sang-hwan, head of the Naver D2SF Center, said, “Defense and manufacturing are fields where supply chain restructuring and technological advancement are proceeding simultaneously worldwide, creating new opportunities,” adding, “F4GE is building a structure that connects on-site capabilities of Korean manufacturing with global defense and manufacturing demand.”
Naver itself has recently been expanding the scope of its technology applications into defense and manufacturing. It is promoting an industrial AX business that includes defense-specialized AI models, defense- and manufacturing-specialized large language models (LLMs), and physical AI, and Naver D2SF also plans to expand the discovery and investment in related technology startups.
Naver D2SF is currently openly recruiting startups for new investments in the defense and manufacturing sectors. Target areas include data analysis and convergence, simulation and verification, physical AI, strategy and tactics AI, command and control and battlefield management, manufacturing and maintenance automation, cybersecurity, and dual-use infrastructure.
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