Upstage
privateUpstage is a South Korean AI company founded in October 2020 by veterans of Naver's Clova AI team: Sung Kim (CEO, former HKUST professor and Clova head), Hwalsuk Lee (CTO, former Clova OCR/visual AI lead), and Lucy Park (US CEO/CSO, former Clova NLP lead). Backed by $163M in funding from SoftBank Ventures Asia, SK Networks, KT Corporation, and others, Upstage closed a ~₩740B Series C in April–May 2026 (a ₩180B first tranche led by Saje Partners, then ₩560B anchored by the National Growth Fund with SK Networks, Woori Venture Partners, and Mirae Asset) at a press-reported post-money valuation of about ₩2T (~$1.35B).
The lab's research centers on the Solar model family, built around the Depth Up-Scaling (DUS) methodology — scaling model depth by duplicating and trimming layers from a base model with continued pre-training. Solar 10.7B (Dec 2023) was the breakthrough, outperforming models twice its size on the HuggingFace Open LLM Leaderboard. Solar Open 100B (Jan 2026, 102B MoE / 12B active, 20T tokens) introduced SnapPO, a cyclic off-policy RL framework for scalable alignment. The current proprietary flagship Solar Pro 3 (Mar 2026, 102B) specializes in multi-step agentic tool use.
Beyond language models, Upstage's Document Parse engine holds SOTA on DP-Bench (94.16 TEDS-S for table structure recognition), and their data-centric research (Dataverse ETL pipeline, KenLM ensembles for text filtering) reflects a focus on the full training data pipeline.
Your notes
People
- Sung Kim Google ScholarOpenReviewGitHub — CEO & Co-founder (formerly HKUST (Professor); Naver Clova (Founding Head); PhD UC Santa Cruz)
- Hwalsuk Lee Google Scholar — CTO & Co-founder (formerly Naver Clova (OCR/Visual AI Lead); KAIST)
- Lucy Park Google ScholarOpenReview — US CEO/CPO & Co-founder (formerly Naver Clova (NLP/MT Lead); PhD Seoul National University)
- Sanghoon Kim — Lead Researcher (Solar, DUS)
News
- 2026-09-13 Upstage Opens a Free Preview of Solar Mini 4, a 35B-A3B Small Model Said to Match Solar Pro 4 at One-Seventh the Size; API GA Planned for September 22 — AI Times
- 2026-07-22 Solar Open 2 Released — 250B-A15B Hybrid-Attention MoE with 1M Context (Open Weights) — Upstage
- 2026-06-16 Upstage Previews 'Solar 2', Claiming External Benchmarks Near Claude Sonnet 4.6; Third-Gen Model Promised by Year-End — The Elec
- 2026-05-03 National Growth Fund Invests ₩560B in Upstage as Its Second Direct Investment; Series C Post-Money Reported at ~₩2T — Seoul Economic Daily
- 2026-05-03 Korea's National Growth Fund and SIF Approve KRW 560B (~$400M) Direct Equity in Upstage — First Software Co. Recipient — Seoul Economic Daily
- 2026-04-15 Upstage Becomes Korea's First Generative AI Unicorn with $126M Series C — Seoul Economic Daily