NAVER 1784

An office building where people and a hundred robots clock in together

📍 Jeongja-dong, Bundang-gu, Seongnam, Gyeonggi Province (Jeongja Station)🗓 Broke ground 2018, completed February 2021🏢 See the company archive →

NAVER's second headquarters, and a building the company calls a giant testbed for its own technology. Self-driving robots deliver coffee, a separate bank of elevators runs for robots only, and employees enter by face recognition rather than an ID card. It is often described as being in Pangyo, but the actual address is Jeongja-dong in Bundang. If you want to see a Korean industrial site that is not a factory, this is the first building most people name.

📊 By the numbers

Size

28 floors above ground, 135.1 m tall

Wikipedia (Korean)

Floor area

About 165,000 m2, room for roughly 5,000 people

ZDNet Korea (2022)

Construction

Broke ground 2018, completed February 2021

Wikipedia (Korean)

Construction cost

About 500 billion won

Money Today (2022)

Service robots

About 100 self-driving 'Rookie' robots

Press briefing (2022)

Technology patents

Over 460 filed, as of April 2025

Electronic Times (2025-04)

Positioning error

0.18 m indoors, 1.05 m outdoors (certified test, March 2022)

Korea Testing Laboratory (KTL), via ZDNet Korea (2022-03)

1784 at a glance: robots whose brains sit outside the building

The cloud does the thinking

ARC (AI, Robot, Cloud) acts as the brain for dozens to hundreds of robots from one place.

A private 5G network: if it drops or lags, the brain cannot live outside the building

The building supplies the map

A digital twin built by mapping robots, plus ARC eye, which matches what a camera sees against that replica to recover its position.

Where am I standing, and which way am I facing

The robots move

About 100 Rookie robots carry drinks and mail to desks, and Roboport, an elevator bank for robots only, moves them between floors.

Instead of putting a brain in every robot, the cloud does the thinking and a private network carries the decisions. NAVER calls this a brainless robot. The three layers below rearrange the technologies listed under The Technology on this page.

📖 The Story

The name 1784 layers two things. One is the lot number of the site, 178-4 Jeongja-dong. The other is the year 1784, which NAVER describes as the start of the first Industrial Revolution. Naming a headquarters after the year the steam engine remade the factory says plainly how the building wants to be read.

Construction began in 2018 and the building was completed in February 2021; it became widely known in April 2022, when the interior was shown to the press. It stands 28 floors and 135.1 m tall, with about 165,000 m2 of floor space and room for roughly 5,000 people. NAVER calls it a tech convergence building and uses it as a place to run AI, cloud, 5G, robotics, autonomous driving and digital twin technology together in one space and see what happens. It is often introduced as the world's first robot-friendly building.

The most striking thing is that robots and people share the same floors. Order a drink at the second-floor cafe and a self-driving robot named Rookie picks it up and carries it to an employee's desk; because that means changing floors, the robots have elevators of their own. Robots never queue for the human elevators, and people never have to step aside for a robot. Both kinds of user were designed into the building from the start.

⚙️ The Technology

›Rookie
The self-driving service robot that moves around the building, with about 100 in operation. It delivers cafe drinks, mail and parcels to employees' desks.
More
What makes Rookie unusual is not the robot's own intelligence. The thinking happens in the data center and cloud inside the building, while the robot supplies only the body. That keeps each unit smaller and cheaper, and when the software improves, all hundred robots get better at once.
›Roboport
An elevator system used only by robots, running in a loop from the second basement level to the roof so that robots changing floors never compete with people for space.
More
This is where retrofitting robots into a building parts ways with designing a building around them. Handing an entire elevator shaft to robots is a decision that can only be made on the drawing board.
›ARC
Named for AI, Robot and Cloud, this is the cloud system that acts as the brain for the building's robots. Because no brain sits inside each machine, they are called brainless robots.
›Private 5G network
Korea's first private 5G network, dedicated to a single site rather than the public carriers. If the cloud is going to serve as the robots' brain, the link between them cannot stall or drop, and this is the infrastructure that keeps it steady.
›Face recognition and the digital twin
Employees enter by face recognition instead of an ID card, and the system reads a face from two or three meters away, mask on. The whole building also exists as a virtual copy, a digital twin built by mapping robots, which is what the service robots navigate by.
›Visual localization (ARC eye)
This is how the robots know where they are in a building that satellite signals never reach. A robot's camera view is matched against the three-dimensional copy of the building, and from that match the system works out which spot it is standing on and which way it is facing. NAVER LABS splits the job in two: ARC eye handles position, ARC brain handles missions and routes.
More
The idea is the opposite of measuring coordinates. Instead of reading a satellite or a magnetic field, the system compares what the camera sees now with a scene it already knows, so accuracy does not collapse indoors or underground where signals die. In a certified test run by Korea Testing Laboratory at the National Museum of Korea and around Bupyeong Station in Incheon, NAVER LABS' visual localization passed with an error of 0.18 m indoors and 1.05 m outdoors (March 2022). The trade-off is what it takes to get there. The space has to be scanned into three dimensions in advance, using a mapping solution NAVER LABS calls ALIKE, and the matching itself runs in the cloud rather than on the robot. That is the line between this and the ordinary phone-based positioning that leans on satellites and a magnetic compass, and lives with errors measured in meters or tens of meters.

🏭 Where It Sits in Korean Industrial History

For decades, going to see Korean industry meant going to a factory: the sewing floors of Guro in the 1960s, the Pohang steelworks and Ulsan shipyards in the 1970s, the chip fabs from the 1980s on. NAVER 1784 belongs in the next slot on that list. When what a company makes is software and services rather than objects, the industrial site stops looking like a smokestack and starts looking like an office building and a data center.

NAVER is itself a product of that shift. After the 1997 financial crisis loosened the grip of the old conglomerate order, a startup boom followed, and a search service that began as an in-house venture at Samsung SDS was spun off in 1999 as Naver Comm. That was the moment information technology became a second pillar of an economy built on manufacturing, and the fact that the same company put up a robot-staffed headquarters twenty-two years later shows how thick that pillar has grown.

The location is part of the story too. Jeongja-dong in Bundang and neighboring Pangyo became, through the 2000s, the district where internet, gaming and platform companies clustered, taking over in a new form the role that the Guro and Ulsan industrial complexes once played. Green Factory, NAVER's first headquarters, completed in 2010, stands directly beside 1784, so two buildings side by side trace a decade of change.

See the company archive →

🎒 Five Minutes Before You Go

What you are looking at is not the robots but the structure that lets them move that way. Carry one sentence in with you, that the brain sits in the building's cloud rather than inside each machine, and the few things you glimpse on the lower floors line up into a single picture. What follows is limited to what a visitor without an invitation can actually see from the public areas.

What to look for

How people react to a passing Rookie
The area around the second-floor cafe is where the delivery robots pass most often. The thing to watch, though, is the people. Nobody stops or stares, and in an experiment about folding robots into ordinary work life, that indifference is the measure of success.
No robot waiting at the human elevators
Roboport, the robot-only elevator bank, is hard to see from the public areas. You confirm it by an absence instead. The robots change floors, yet none of them is ever queued at the passenger elevators, which means they are travelling by a route of their own.
Gates that open without a card
Staff walk through the lobby gates without reaching for a card or a phone. Face recognition picks them out from two or three meters away, mask on. If one detail sums up the whole building, it is this one.
The five-story atrium, seen from the ground floor
The low-rise section opens upward through five floors. It is easy to read as nothing more than a sense of space, but robots need continuous, level, unobstructed routes, and that requirement is written into the architecture. This is what it looks like when robots are counted as users from the drawing board on.
The two headquarters, side by side
This one takes nothing but standing outside. Green Factory, completed in 2010, and 1784, completed in 2021, stand right next to each other. The green-clad first headquarters and the second one that calls itself a testbed: the decade between them is the clearest statement of what the company turned into.

What to mind, and what not to expect

When a robot is coming, you are the one who steps aside. It is carrying someone's lunch, and standing in its way to film it is the surest way to be a nuisance here.
Photography rules differ from area to area. Check the signage first, and do not photograph employees or the screens they are working on.
The robot delivery service is for employees. A visitor cannot order a coffee and have a robot bring it. Watching and being served are two different things.
The lobby is not a viewing gallery but a corridor for five thousand people. Stand out of the flow, and if you are with others, stay together.
Anything closed off stays closed off. This is a private company's headquarters, and if a gate does not open for you, that is the answer.

🧭 Can You Visit?

What you can see

This is a private corporate headquarters, so the working floors are closed to outsiders. The low-rise public area is a different matter: the lobby opens into an atrium running up through the first five floors, and a Starbucks on the second floor gives you a spot where service robots can be seen coming and going. Several visitor accounts describe walking the first two floors without any reservation, but that is visitor testimony rather than official policy, so follow the reception desk and do not push past anything that is closed off. If you want a space you are certain to be admitted to, it is the Connect Lounge on floors one and two of Green Factory next door: free, with no ID check.

Tours

There is no regular tour that an individual can sign up for. Interior tours are arranged for partner companies, institutions and participants in specific training programs, that is, visits set up by invitation or prior arrangement. For an individual, joining such a program or an organized group visit is effectively the only way inside.

Getting there

About 600 m from Exit 3 of Jeongja Station on the Shinbundang and Suin-Bundang lines, a walk of a little over ten minutes. It is roughly twenty minutes from Gangnam Station in Seoul and one stop from Pangyo Station. Despite being widely called the NAVER building in Pangyo, it sits in a different neighborhood from the Pangyo Techno Valley. Green Factory and 1784 stand side by side, so you see both in one trip.

Please note

People work here. Some areas restrict photography and the lobby is a corridor shared with staff, so check the signage before taking pictures and keep out of the flow of people. When a robot is coming through, you are the one who steps aside.

as of 2026-08

🚶 How to Walk It

1Jeongja Station, Exit 3
Where the Shinbundang and Suin-Bundang lines meet. From here it is about 600 m, a walk of a little over ten minutes, to Green Factory and 1784. The two buildings stand together, and the walk itself shows you an ordinary business district of the Bundang new town.
💡 Around twenty minutes from Gangnam Station, so it pairs easily with a half day in Seoul.
2Connect Lounge (Green Factory, floors 1 and 2)
The old NAVER Library in the 2010 headquarters, renovated and reopened in February 2025. Anyone can walk in free, with no membership and no ID check; nothing circulates, so you read on site. It holds books NAVER has published since 2007, a shelf of staff recommendations, and the IT and design collection from the former library.
💡 Weekdays 09:30 to 19:30, closed weekends and public holidays (as of August 2026). It is the one interior space on this trip you are sure to be let into, so with a foreign visitor it is the safer place to start.
3The low-rise lobby of 1784
Standing on the ground floor, the atrium opens upward through five levels. The staff gates open by face recognition rather than an ID card, and that one detail explains what the building is testing. The working floors are off limits unless you are there by invitation.
💡 If you are coming by invitation, the employee hosting you registers you in advance through the app and issues a QR pass. It needs your consent to share personal data and an app install, so handle it before the day rather than at the desk.
4Around the second-floor cafe: where you watch the robots
The second floor has a Starbucks, and the area around it is where the Rookie robots are most often seen passing through. The delivery service itself is for employees, so a visitor cannot order a coffee and have a robot bring it. Watching and being served are two different things.
💡 This is the easiest place to explain the building to someone. The robots do not queue for the human elevators because Roboport exists for them, and from there the story of brains kept in the cloud follows naturally.
5Jeongja Cafe Street and the Tancheon
Cafes and restaurants run along the Tancheon stream. It is a good walk after the two headquarters buildings, and it shows what Bundang, planned and built in the 1990s, has become.

🗺 Pair Your Visit

Connect LoungeThe building next door

An open space on floors one and two of Green Factory. No reservation, no ID check and no charge, which makes it the one interior space here you are certain to get into. Weekdays 09:30 to 19:30, closed weekends and holidays (as of August 2026).

Green FactoryNext door

NAVER's first headquarters, completed in 2010, standing right beside 1784. Seeing the two buildings together shows what the company set out to build in the decade between them.

Jeongja Cafe StreetAbout 10 minutes on foot

A stretch of cafes and restaurants along the Tancheon stream near Jeongja Station, and an easy way to get a feel for what the Bundang new town is like.

Pangyo Techno ValleyOne stop on the Shinbundang line

Korea's best-known IT cluster, home to gaming, platform and biotech companies. Paired with a look at 1784, it explains why this area gets called the country's new industrial complex.

📚 Exam Points (Korean History Exam)

This building will not appear on a Korean history exam. What does appear, and often, is the sequence it sits at the end of: the 1997 financial crisis and the restructuring and startup boom that followed, and before that the economic development plans that carried the country from light industry in the 1960s to heavy and chemical industry in the 1970s. NAVER 1784 occupies the last slot of that timeline, the one the textbooks have not reached yet.

Study the related era →