Upstage
Upstage is an enterprise AI company focused on “AGI for work,” building efficient large language models (LLMs) and document processing engines to transform how organizations handle knowledge and workflows. The company targets high‑stakes, document‑heavy industries such as finance, insurance, and healthcare, offering domain‑tuned models that emphasize accuracy, groundedness, and cost‑efficiency.
Use Cases
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Financial & Insurance Operations: Automating underwriting, claims processing, contract analysis, and KYC/AML document review to cut down billions in manual processing inefficiencies.
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Healthcare & Life Sciences: Extracting structured data from medical documents, lab reports, and clinical notes while maintaining compliance and privacy.
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Enterprise Knowledge & Back‑Office: AI copilots for HR, legal, procurement, and customer support, using Solar LLM + Document AI to power search, summarization, and workflow automation.
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Localization & Multilingual Workflows: Korean‑, Japanese‑, and Asian‑language optimized models for translation, content creation, and regional customer service.
Customers & Markets
Upstage primarily serves enterprise customers in Korea, Japan, and broader Asia, with growing presence in North America and Europe through its San Jose and Hong Kong hubs. Its solutions are adopted by major clients in finance, insurance, healthcare, manufacturing, and IT services that need highly accurate, compliant AI on private or regulated data.
Research, Partnerships & Innovations
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Research Focus: Efficient LLM architectures (DUS), long‑context reasoning, multimodal document understanding, and robust RAG for regulated industries.
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Partnerships: Strategic collaboration agreements with AWS, Oracle , and Intel to accelerate training and deployment; ecosystem integrations with Amazon SageMaker and major cloud marketplaces.
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Innovations: Solar LLM line (Mini, Pro, Pro 2) challenging “bigger is better” by achieving top benchmark scores in compact sizes, high‑accuracy Document AI with 99% classification, and road‑mapped 100B+ parameter model plus agentic task execution for multi‑step workflow automation.
Recognition & Funding
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Recognized by regional and global AI communities as a leading “enterprise challenger” for specialized LLMs and document intelligence, frequently benchmarked against models from OpenAI, DataRobot, H2O.ai, and NVIDIA .
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Reported rapid growth with new orders doubling in early 2024 after the launch of Document Parse and Solar LLM, and continued expansion plans targeting Japan, Southeast Asia, and the U.S. market.
Key People
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Sung-hoon (Sung) Kim – Founder & CEO: Former head of Naver Clova AI and renowned “Deep Learning for Everyone” lecturer; founded Upstage after seeing enterprises struggle to operationalize AI.
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Stan Lee – Co‑founder & CTO: Previously led Naver Clova’s Visual AI team, bringing deep expertise in OCR and computer vision.
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Lucy Park – Co‑founder & CSO: Former head of Naver Papago modeling team, specializing in language AI and multilingual NLP.