South Korea's Upstage Joins Global AI Race with New LLM

South Korea’s Upstage is rapidly emerging as a formidable challenger in the global artificial intelligence arena, with its advanced large language models (LLMs) demonstrating performance on par with, and in some cases surpassing, those from established tech giants in the US and China. The Seoul-based startup has quickly carved out a significant niche, not only through its technological prowess but also via a strategic global expansion and substantial financial backing.

At the heart of Upstage’s ascent is its flagship LLM, Solar, and its variants like Solar Pro 2 and Solar Mini. In a landmark achievement in August 2023, Upstage’s 70-billion-parameter LLM, fine-tuned with Meta’s LLaMA 2, secured the top spot on the HuggingFace Open LLM Leaderboard with an average score of 72.3, outperforming OpenAI’s GPT-3.5. This marked a pivotal moment, as it was reportedly the first instance of an open-source model surpassing a global tech giant on this widely recognized benchmark. Earlier, in July 2023, their 30-billion-parameter model had already claimed the lead, even ahead of Meta’s LLaMA 2 70B.

The innovation continues with Solar Pro 2, a 31-billion-parameter model designed for complex tasks across finance, healthcare, and legal sectors. It boasts exceptional multilingual capabilities in Korean, English, and Japanese, and its “Reasoning Mode” significantly enhances accuracy in multi-step challenges, even rivaling models twice its size in mathematics and software engineering tasks. Furthermore, Upstage’s 13-billion-parameter LLM, developed in collaboration with Qanda and KT, demonstrated superior mathematical reasoning, outperforming Microsoft’s ToRA 13B and even achieving an impressive 48.8% accuracy against GPT-4 on the MATH dataset in January 2024. The company is also set to roll out a multimodal AI capability in June, integrating its Document Parse engine with the Solar LLM, which internal tests indicate outperforms Meta’s LLaMA 4 Scout and Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro in accuracy.

Beyond raw performance, Upstage is focused on delivering “AI for work” solutions that enhance business productivity. Its Document Parse (DP) and Document AI solutions, powered by optical character recognition (OCR) technology, convert scanned documents into editable text files with remarkable speed and accuracy, reportedly outperforming offerings from Amazon Web Services, Google, and Microsoft. This technology has already found strong adoption among major South Korean financial institutions, including Samsung Card, Hanwha Life Insurance, and KB Kookmin Bank, demonstrating its practical utility in high-stakes environments.

The company’s global ambitions are clear. Upstage secured $72 million in Series B funding in April 2024, bringing its total investment to over $100 million and making it the most-funded AI software company in South Korea’s history. This capital is fueling its aggressive international expansion, particularly into the US and Japanese markets, where it established subsidiaries in 2024 and March 2025, respectively. In Japan, Upstage is collaborating with local partners to develop Syn, a Japanese-specialized compact language model tailored for enterprise applications. The startup has also made inroads into Southeast Asia, notably deploying a Thai language-specific LLM for Jasmine Technology Solutions in a project marking Korea’s first sovereign AI export. Upstage CEO Sung Kim, who previously led Naver’s HyperCLOVA AI engine, emphasizes the company’s commitment to bringing proven Korean AI work standards to the global stage and delivering measurable business outcomes.

Upstage’s strategic importance has also been recognized at a national level. In August 2025, it was selected as one of five consortia to lead South Korea’s national AI foundation model project. This initiative aims to develop proprietary LLMs using purely domestic technology to ensure global competitiveness and digital sovereignty, with Upstage’s Solar WBL model at the forefront of this endeavor.

With its groundbreaking LLM performance, a clear focus on enterprise solutions, significant funding, and a well-defined global expansion strategy, Upstage is poised to become a key player in the evolving landscape of artificial intelligence, challenging the established order and demonstrating South Korea’s growing prowess in this critical technological domain.