Naver and Kakao are the two biggest tech companies in South Korea. Naver was born in 1999, and it is a startup that successfully transitioned to one of the top companies in Korea in terms of market cap after IPO-ing in 2002. Today, Naver is ranked #9 in KOSPI (the S&P 500 equivalent). Kakao started as a small startup in 2010 with a messenger app called KakaoTalk (which still has a dominant 95% service usage time in the Korean market as of December 2021) and expanded to different business verticals as years passed. In 2014, it merged with Naver’s direct competitor in the search and web portal segment called Daum. Today, Kakao is ranked #14 in KOSPI in terms of market cap.