South Korean AI Startup Upstage Raises $120M, Becomes Country's First Generative AI Unicorn

Gate News message, April 15 — South Korean AI startup Upstage recently closed the first tranche of its Series C funding round at $120 million, bringing its total funding to approximately $270 million. The company said this makes it South Korea’s first generative AI unicorn. Upstage plans to use the funds to develop its foundation models, expand operations in the U.S. and Japan, and hire additional staff.

The round was driven by enterprise demand for Upstage’s Solar LLM and Document Intelligence suite, which extracts and processes data from documents to reduce back-office costs. The Solar Pro model costs as little as $0.30 per million tokens, lowering processing costs compared to larger rivals. Clients such as Tricura Insurance Group reported application review times dropping from 30-60 minutes to under 10 minutes.

Upstage reported over 130% year-over-year revenue growth and received support from Amazon, including AWS, and chipmaker AMD. The company’s Solar Pro 2 model achieved top scores on Korean-language benchmarks, aligning with South Korea’s push for AI sovereignty.

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