Riyadh – Sharikat Mubasher: South Korea’s Naver Cloud signed a strategic deal with Saudi National Housing Company (NHC) to launch a joint venture aimed at driving digital transformation in the Kingdom’s urban and residential sectors.

According to a recent press release, the new entity, named Naver Innovation, will be co-established with NHC’s tech arm, NHC Innovation. It marks Naver Cloud’s first official business operation in the Middle East under its regional headquarters, Naver Arabia.

Naver Innovation will focus on rolling out a location-based lifestyle app to assist residents and tourists with services like housing, transportation, and daily logistics. The company also plans to scale its digital twin platform—a tool for urban planning that uses real-time data to simulate and manage city systems—across major Saudi cities.

The joint venture follows a memorandum of understanding signed at Cityscape Global 2024 and builds on Naver Cloud’s ongoing digital twin platform work with the Saudi Ministry of Municipal, Rural Affairs, and Housing.