Upstage

Upstage 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 is valued at approximately 1 trillion KRW (~$750M–$1B).

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.