South Korean artificial intelligence startup Upstage unveiled Wednesday ambitious plans to expand into the global enterprise AI market, primarily focusing on the US and Japan.
“Upstage AI is about shaping a better future of work,” said CEO Kim Sung-hoon during a press briefing in Seoul. “We aim to bring the proven AI work standards established in Korea to the global stage and deliver measurable business outcomes through AI.”
The AI company recently made headlines by partnering with domestic telecom carrier KT Corp. to deploy a Thai language-specific large language model for Jasmine Technology Solutions, an IT arm of Thailand's tech giant Jasmine Group.
The project marked Korea’s first sovereign AI deployment overseas, cementing Upstage’s reputation for technical excellence and expanding its presence in the Southeast Asian AI market.
Last month, Upstage established its subsidiary in Japan, following its US expansion last year. In Japan, the company is developing a Japanese-specialized LLM in collaboration with local partners.
The key to Upstage’s global strategy is its full-stack AI platform, designed for enterprise use.
With the recent appointment of Hiroyuki Matsushita, a seasoned executive formerly with Panasonic and Amazon Web Services, to lead the Japanese arm, the company is positioning itself to capture a significant share of Japan’s generative AI market, projected to reach $11.85 billion by 2030.
Upstage’s strategy targets Japan’s document-intensive enterprise environment -- estimated to be over 10 times larger than Korea’s.
The company aims to boost operational efficiency for Japanese firms through AI, particularly with the launch of Syn, a compact language model co-developed with Japanese chatbot startup Karakuri. Syn is tailored for industries such as finance, health care, manufacturing and legal services.
In the United States, Upstage plans to leverage its successful document parsing use cases with major Korean insurers like Samsung Life Insurance and Hanwha Life to appeal to enterprise clients.
It also seeks to replicate its Thai LLM success in other regions showing interest in sovereign AI, including Southeast Asia and the Middle East.
To strengthen its global competitiveness, Upstage is advancing its LLM development. At Wednesday’s event, the company introduced Solar Pro 1.3, which currently holds the highest benchmark scores among Korean-made models. It also plans to release Solar Pro 1.5 in June, a 33-billion-parameter model offering enhanced fluency and usability.
Starting in June, Upstage will also roll out multimodal AI capabilities. Combining its Document Parse engine with the Solar LLM, the new vision-language model will support document-based applications such as summarization, Q&A and report generation.
According to internal testing, the model outperforms Meta’s LLaMA 4 Scout and Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro in accuracy.
“We are establishing the standard for enterprise AI in Korea through our own Solar LLM and Document Parse technology,” the CEO said. “Now, we are ready to take that standard global.”
By Jie Ye-eun (yeeun@heraldcorp.com)
