Founded: October 2020
Founders/Leadership: Sung Kim (Co-founder & CEO), Lee Hwal-suk (CTO), Park Eunjeong (Co-founder & CSO)—former lead from Naver’s HyperCLOVA team
Headquarters: Seoul, South Korea
Focus: Development of Korean-centric large language models (LLMs) and enterprise AI tools like Document AI and Solar
Funding: Upstage AI has raised ₩140 billion (~$100M) to date, including a ₩31.6B Series A (2021) and a ₩100B Series B (2024)—the largest for a Korean AI software startup.
Overview
Upstage builds enterprise-ready AI with a Korean language-first approach. Its suite includes:
- Document AI (DP): High-speed OCR processing (≈0.6 seconds per page) with top-tier accuracy in banking and insurance use cases
- Solar LLM family: Ranging from Solar Mini (10.7 B params) to Solar Pro (22 B, launching on AWS Bedrock), which ranks top among sub-70B models and supports English, Japanese, Thai, and Korean aibusiness.com
What Upstage Does
- Deploys LLMs via AWS integrations (SageMaker, Bedrock, ISV Accelerate)
- Offers private/hybrid/on-premises AI deployment for data sovereignty
- Builds national-language ecosystems:
- Founded the “1T Club” to collect a trillion Korean tokens for sovereign LLM training
- Partnered with NIA to launch OpenKo LLM Leaderboard focused on Korean-language model benchmarking
Use Cases
- Automated document parsing and summarization for finance, insurance, legal, and government
- Multimodal AI workflows (document + language understanding launched June 2025)
- White-label LLM APIs via AWS for customization in sectors like e-commerce (ConnectWave), education (QANDA), and healthcare
Why Upstage Stands Out
- Korean-first LLMs optimized for local cultural and linguistic nuance
- Enterprise-centric architecture with full-stack capabilities (OCR, LLM, deployment)
- Proven performance: consistently ranked #1 on Open LLM Leaderboards; Solar Pro and Syn models outperform larger global peers press.
- Strategic alliances: AWS (multi-year SCA), NIA, national scoreboard partners, and enterprise clients (Samsung Card, Hanwha Life, KB Bank).
