Upstage succeeded in attracting unprecedented investment and entered the ranks of potential unicorn corporations.
Upstage (CEO Kim Seong-hoon), a specialist in artificial intelligence (AI), announced on the sixteenth that it had attracted Series B investment value roughly 100 billion won. That is roughly thrice the Series A investment accomplished in 2021 at 31.6 billion won.
On this investment, many institutions, including ▲SK Networks ▲KT ▲Korea Development Bank ▲Shinhan Enterprise Investment ▲Hana Ventures ▲Mirae Asset Enterprise Investment ▲Industrial Bank of Korea, were named as latest investors.
As well as, existing investors equivalent to ▲SBVA (formerly Softbank Ventures) ▲Primer Company ▲Company K Partners ▲Premier Partners also made follow-up investments and reaffirmed their unwavering trust within the AI business to Upstage.
In consequence, Upstage has secured a cumulative investment of roughly 140 billion won from seed investment to Series A and B. That is the most important investment amount attracted by a domestic AI software company in recent times, and it seems that each potential and growth potential have been recognized as a preliminary AI unicorn even while the cold weather in enterprise investment continues.
The background to the large-scale investment is the successful establishment of the 'Document AI' product, a company document and unstructured data digitization solution previously developed by Upstage, in addition to the business and technical performance of 'Solar', its own pre-learning large language model (LLM) launched last December. The evaluation is that proving one's capabilities on the worldwide stage was effective.
Above all, it’s explained that there are only a handful of corporations on the earth like Upstage which have developed a pre-learning model and succeeded in commercializing it.
With Solar on the forefront, Upstage is achieving ends in various fields equivalent to finance, law, and on-device AI, and is creating examples of cooperation with leading global corporations, equivalent to signing a technology transfer agreement with a number one telecommunication company in Southeast Asia and establishing a specialized LLM. The evaluation is that when you mix this with a document AI solution that has realized document processing automation in collaboration with a number one domestic insurance company, there’s a very good probability of success in overseas markets.
Profitability indicators are also noticeably improving. Last yr, we began commercializing Document AI in the primary half of the yr and Solar LLM within the second half of the yr, securing latest contracts value 10 billion won in a brief time period, recording a growth rate of greater than twice that of before the product launch.
As well as, together with the expansion of Solar's global business, the corporate pioneered markets with high demand for document processing equivalent to finance, insurance, and medical care with its document AI products, achieving performance comparable to last yr's latest contract amount in the primary quarter of this yr alone. Currently, additional contracts value 30 billion won are being discussed at home and abroad, and sales are expected to grow greater than double this yr in comparison with last yr.
Solar is smaller than the Big Tech model and has faster speed and performance, making it an optimized model for the company LLM market where speed and price efficiency are key. As well as, it was revealed that the undeniable fact that it possesses its own technology to boost model performance, equivalent to 'DUS (Depth Extension Scaling)', and was recognized through the adoption of a paper by a world-renowned academic society was also essential.
As proof of this, Solar has recently been installed as a representative pre-learning model on global platforms equivalent to 'Amazon SageMaker Jumpstart', which provides AI models on AWS. As well as, a latest ecosystem is being created, with over 1,000 fine-tuned models based on the Solar English model released as open source.
With this investment, Upstage will further speed up its efforts to focus on the worldwide generative AI market. The plan is to expand contacts with global enterprise corporations based on the U.S. corporation established at the tip of February and to deal with discovering demand for constructing specialized LLMs for corporations.
As well as, to expand the Solar ecosystem, open source projects equivalent to data preprocessing and language model evaluation platforms shall be advanced, and various events equivalent to a world hackathon shall be introduced for AI developers world wide.
Kim Seong-hoon, CEO of Upstage, said, “Upstage has confirmed expectations as Korea’s leading generative AI company by attracting the most important investment in history despite the cruel investment environment.” “We’ll develop into an organization that achieves results and is recognized on the worldwide stage, including in Southeast Asia, while continuing to advance Solar into the world’s best language model,” he said.
Reporter Jang Se-min semim99@aitimes.com