Upstage Secures 100B KRW to Fuel for Global Expansion and Advancements in Generative AI
The South Korean AI startup Upstage has successfully raised KRW 100 billion in a Series B funding round. This round saw participation from new investors including SK Networks, KT, Korea Development Bank (KDB), Shinhan Venture Investment, Hana Ventures, Mirae Asset Venture Investment, and IBK.
Existing investors such as SBVA (formerly SoftBank Ventures), Primer Sazze Partners, Company K Partners, and Premier Partners also made additional investments. With this latest round, Upstage has amassed a total of approximately KRW 140 billion in investment from its inception through Series B.
The substantial funding can be attributed to the successful implementation of Upstage’s “Document AI,” a digital solution for corporate documents and unstructured data, along with the business potential and technical prowess demonstrated by its proprietary pre-trained large language model (LLM), “Solar,” which was launched in December. This model has proven its effectiveness on the international stage.
Using Solar, Upstage has generated significant results in various sectors including finance, law, and on-device AI. The company has established technology transfer agreements with leading Southeast Asian telecom operators and has engaged in collaborations with prominent global companies to develop specialized LLMs. Additionally, by partnering with a major domestic insurance company with its Document AI solution, Upstage is expected to grow into a strong competitor on the internal stage.
There has been a noticeable improvement in revenue metrics as well. Following the launch of Document AI and the commercial rollout of the Solar LLM in the latter half of last year, Upstage quickly secured new contracts worth KRW 10 billion, marking a growth rate more than double that of the period before the product’s launch. Moreover, the global expansion of Solar and the pioneering of markets with high demand for document processing in sectors like finance, insurance, and healthcare have led to Upstage matching last year’s new contract revenue in just the first quarter of this year alone. Currently, the company is negotiating additional contracts worth KRW 30 billion both domestically and internationally, with projections indicating more than a doubling of last year’s revenue.
Solar is recognized as an optimal model for the corporate LLM market, offering smaller size, faster speed, and superior performance compared to larger tech models. Upstage has further developed its own technologies like “Depth-Up Scaling” (DUS) to enhance model performance, gaining recognition through publications in prestigious international conferences.
Demonstrating its capabilities, Solar has recently been featured as a representative pre-trained model on global platforms such as Amazon SageMaker JumpStart. Moreover, leveraging the open-source English version of Solar, over 1,000 fine-tuning models have been developed.
With this funding, Upstage is set to accelerate its push into the global generative AI market. The company aims to expand its global enterprise reach via its recently established U.S. subsidiary, focusing on the construction of enterprise-specific LLMs and enhancing the Solar ecosystem through advancements in open-source projects like data preprocessing and language model evaluation platforms. Upstage also plans to showcase a variety of global events, including hackathons aimed at AI developers worldwide.
Sung-Hoon Kim, CEO of Upstage, remarked, “Despite a challenging investment landscape, Upstage has secured a record-breaking investment, reaffirming its position as a leading generative AI company in Korea. With this investment, we aim to not only achieve but also be recognized for our success on a global scale, including in the U.S., Japan, and Southeast Asia, and we are committed to continually advancing Solar to establish it as the world’s premier language model.”
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