Upstage: Korea's Solar model bet, KRW 200B funding

What the business is

Korean AI company: self-developed frontier-grade large model Solar (locally deployable or accessible via API) plus document AI (OCR and data extraction), doing B2B AI for enterprises, with customers including Samsung (三星) and Hanwha (韩华).

Starting capital：Cumulative about KRW 200 billion: KRW 31.6 billion raised in Series A in 2021; KRW 100 billion (about USD 72 million) raised in Series B in 2024; KRW 62 billion raised in a Series B bridge in August 2025.

How it started

In October 2020, Sung Kim (金成勋), a professor at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (香港科大) and former overall head of Naver Clova AI, founded Upstage (업스테이지). Co-founders included a former head of Kakao AI, and the team came from Naver, Kakao and Nvidia. The starting business was AI transformation consulting and internal AI talent development for enterprises—Sung Kim's open deep learning lectures had 6 million views in Korea, giving the company industry appeal from the start.

What happened

In 2021, Series A raised KRW 31.6 billion; the company shifted to self-developed products, producing the Solar large model using Depth-Up Scaling technology—fast, cost-efficient and small—and document AI (OCR), with customers including Samsung (三星) and Hanwha (韩华); in April 2024, Series B raised KRW 100 billion (about USD 72 million), cumulative over USD 100 million, becoming the most-funded AI software company in Korea, with KT, SK Networks, Korea Development Bank (韩国产业银行) and others participating, and it opened a San Jose office; in August 2025, it received another KRW 62 billion bridge round, with Amazon and AMD newly entering, signed a strategic partnership with AWS, and was selected as one of five teams in the Ministry of Science and ICT (韩国科技部) 'sovereign AI foundation model' national team.

How it ended up

Still running: as of 2026-09-01, cumulative funding was about KRW 200 billion; Solar and document AI continue to commercialize, entering a global expansion phase; it has not yet IPO'd, and remains one of the highest-funded companies in Korea's AI software sector.

What can be applied

Consulting revealed customers feared U.S. APIs; self-developed Solar for private deployment. Efficiency (small, fast, cheap) avoided compute arms race.