Seoul: South Korean startup Upstage said Wednesday it has plans to enter the global market with high-performance artificial intelligence (AI) models designed to enhance productivity in everyday business operations. "Based on our AI technologies for improving business productivity, we will expand our global strategy to help each country in Asia and around the world create sovereign AI models," Sung Kim, co-founder and chief executive officer (CEO) of Upstage, said in a press conference.
According to Yonhap News Agency, Kim highlighted two key AI solutions -- Document Parse (DP) and Solar -- for the company's productivity-focused vision. DP is Upstage's flagship no-code program based on optical character recognition (OCR) technology that converts scanned documents into editable and sharable text files. He said DP ranked first in accuracy and speed compared to AI-powered OCR tools from Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google, Microsoft, and others. Korea's leading financial institutions, including Samsung Card Co., Hanwha Life Insurance Co., and KB Kookmin Bank, are among its clients, he added.
Solar, a large language model (LLM), helps users generate final reports based on data processed from DP. "Upstage is setting the standard for AI-powered work in Korea, and is bringing it to the global stage with DP, which converts virtually any document into data for AI training, and Solar, which we developed through our own pre-training," said Kim, who previously led Naver's HyperCLOVA AI engine project.
The company plans to launch a multimodal AI model that integrates DP and Solar in June, along with a new inference AI model. In line with its global expansion, Upstage has participated in a joint project to create an LLM for the Thai language. It is South Korea's first case of exporting a sovereign AI model to a foreign country, according to Kim.
Its U.S. subsidiary, Upstage US, is currently in talks with several S and P 500-listed insurance companies to implement its AI solutions, while its Japan office recently opened. "We will continue to spread Korea's AI work standards to the global market and demonstrate how AI can deliver tangible business results," Kim said.