Naver Innovation signs a second Saudi MoU with restaurant platform Wddk

Naver Innovation signed a memorandum of understanding with Wddk, a Saudi restaurant discovery and reservation platform, at LEAP 2026 in Riyadh, to explore building a combined service that connects dining reservations, payments, ticketing and discount offers. Naver Innovation is the joint venture between Naver Cloud and NHC Innovation, itself tied to Saudi Arabia's National Housing Company, and it has spent the week signing more than one Saudi agreement. The company also signed a separate memorandum with the Real Estate Registry to explore digital solutions for property and local-administration services, and its cloud-based digital twin platform was designated Saudi Arabia's national standard for local government use earlier in August. The Wddk agreement is a distinct deal from both, reported alongside them but covering a different market entirely: consumer dining rather than land records or municipal infrastructure. Wddk describes itself as Saudi Arabia's largest restaurant discovery and demand platform, built around real-time reservations at fine-dining restaurants, plus a business-facing product that lets hospitality groups manage bookings and loyalty programmes under their own branding. That consumer base and merchant network is the asset Naver Innovation is exploring how to build on. Korean reporting describes the two sides examining a service that ties together reservations, payment, ticketing and discount benefits under one flow, rather than the separate steps a diner currently manages across a booking app, a payment method and whatever loyalty scheme a restaurant runs on its own. That is a familiar pattern from Naver's home market. Naver Pay and the wider Naver ecosystem in South Korea already bundle discovery, reservation, payment and rewards into a single experience across many categories of local commerce, and the logic of pairing a South Korean platform operator with a Saudi merchant network that already leads its category is that neither side has to build the other's piece from scratch. Wddk brings the restaurants and the reservation volume; Naver Innovation would bring the platform engineering and, presumably, its existing relationships inside the kingdom's digital infrastructure. It also extends Naver's Saudi footprint beyond government and property services into everyday consumer transactions, a step that puts the company's local ambitions on a broader base than the smart-city and land-registry work that has otherwise defined its presence at the show. Naver's Real Estate Registry agreement , signed the same week, and its digital twin platform's designation as a national standard , show the company building outward from public infrastructure roles it already holds through the NHC joint venture; this MoU instead reaches toward a market Naver has no existing foothold in. As with the other agreements, this is a memorandum of understanding rather than a signed commercial contract. Korean coverage frames the work as the two companies examining the possibility of building such a service, not launching one, and no timeline, investment figure or technical architecture has been published. Whether the result becomes a Naver-branded feature inside Wddk's existing app, a new joint product, or nothing beyond an exploratory study is not something either side has said. What would confirm this moved past the memorandum stage is a pilot inside Wddk's existing restaurant network, with a stated number of participating venues and a working payment flow a diner can actually use. TechScoop is reporting from LEAP 2026 in Riyadh.