South Korea’s top online portal operator Naver Corp. has acquired the country’s first and largest social learning service app developer Bapul to add to its fleet of diverse startups engaged in online-to-offline businesses.

According to multiple sources from the venture investment industry on Friday, Naver’s subsidiary Line Plus Corp. signed a purchasing agreement with Bapul on Monday. The financial terms were not disclosed but sources estimate the value to reach tens of billions of won.

Shares of Naver jumped 2.26 percent or 19,000 won ($17.7) on Friday to close at 861,000 won.

Bapul is a provider of Baro Pulki smartphone application that helps middle and high school students solve tricky math questions. When an application user takes a photo of a math question with his or her smartphone and uploads it, the app tutors in the problem-solving.

Baro Pulki solves the problem using big data, in which about 1 million math problems are saved and stored. When the user opens the application and takes a photo of a math question, the app immediately analyzes numbers and sentences to find the same or similar question stored in big data before providing an explanation of it to the user in a very short period of time.

The latest acquisition is one of many that Naver has been engaged in lately. On Thursday, Naver announced that it will buy Drama & Company, a business card service developer that manages Remember application. The financial terms for this acquisition that involved Line Plus as buyer was also not revealed.

When users of Remember app take a photo of business cards they received offline, the app saves information automatically on the smartphone.

Ahead of the purchase, Naver and Line Plus jointly invested 10 billion won in Drama & Company. Naver has invested more than 150 billion won this year in acquiring shares of venture firms and in promoting merger and acquisitions - the largest amount Korean companies. Most of the firms invested by Naver focus on providing online-to-offline services, following the trend of its bigger multinational rivals like Amazon and Google.

By Chung Woo-sung and Lee Eun-joo

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