Upstage

🇰🇷 Upstage

🚀 From Seoul to the Global AI Stage: Founded in 2020 by former Naver researchers, Upstage has quickly become South Korea’s strongest AI challenger. With its latest model, Solar Pro 2, the startup surpasses GPT-4.1 and DeepSeek V3 on benchmarks—using just 31 billion parameters, thanks to in-house scaling techniques like Depth-Up Scaling (DUS).

💡 The success recipe:

• Strong performance especially in Korean/Japanese/English and high efficiency: less compute, more output

• Smart commercialization via APIs, document solutions, and public-sector clients

🤑 Funding:

With partners like Amazon, AWS & AMD and customers across finance, healthcare, and tech, Upstage proves world-class AI can emerge outside the US and China. Amazon recently took a strategic minority stake, and AWS is now the preferred cloud partner. $150M+ in funding is fueling the next expansion in APAC & the US.