Upstage Holds ‘Media Day’ on 16th
Announces the unveiling of a multimodal ‘Vision Language Model’ combining proprietary OCR and LLM technology
Proven commercialization with a 25 billion KRW contract with major domestic and international companies
Aims to penetrate the global AI B2B market in the US, Japan, Southeast Asia, etc.
Seonghoon Kim, CEO of Upstage, stated at the ‘Media Day’ event held at Conrad Hotel in Yeouido, Seoul on the 16th, “The year 2025 will be a milestone for AI surpassing humans in all areas.” He presented a vision to lead the global AI work standards through workplace AI, accelerating the ‘future of work.’
Upstage is a tech company specializing in AI, offering models like ‘Document Parse’, an AI-based document processing solution, and the large language model (LLM) ‘Solar’.
The event was attended by key executives including Seonghoon Kim, CTO Hwalseok Lee, COO Soonil Kwon, VP of Enterprise Solutions Hongjun Choi, and Hiroyuki Matsushita, head of the Japan office.
Kim emphasized, “Even a 1% increase in the productivity of Korea’s approximately 29 million economically active population could create an economic impact of around 14 trillion KRW annually.” He stressed that the adoption of AI automation in the industry is essential for productivity improvement and strengthening industrial and national competitiveness.
As a core strategy, Upstage is accelerating AI transformation in each industry with △ AI-based optical character recognition (OCR) document processing technology ‘Document Parse (DP)’ and △ large language model (LLM) ‘Solar’, proposing new standards for work processes.
Kim stated, “There are few companies worldwide that have developed a full stack of AI models from OCR to LLM internally.” Upstage is setting the domestic AI work standard and expanding it to the global market, leveraging DP, which can convert any document into AI training data, and Solar, developed through proprietary pre-training.
Upstage has unique technical competitiveness in the field of industry-specific small language models rather than general-purpose models. The ‘Solar Pro 1.3’ version, released in April, has the highest benchmark performance among domestic models.
In June, Upstage plans to release the △ ‘Solar Pro 1.5’ version, expanded from the existing 22 billion parameters to 33 billion, along with △ the first inference model implementing ‘Chain of Thought (CoT)’, comparable to OpenAI’s ‘o’ series and DeepSeek’s R1.
Furthermore, Upstage aims to expand into multimodal by integrating OCR and LLM. The ‘Vision Language Model (VLM)’, scheduled for release in June, combines DP and Solar, allowing various document-based LLM tasks like information summarization, Q&A, and report generation with a single model. Test results show higher accuracy than Meta’s ‘Llama 4 Scout’ and Google’s ‘Gemini 2.5 Pro’.
The introduction of use cases in the industry continued. Since launching Solar last year, Upstage has partnered with Hancom to create ‘Hancom Assistant’ and with Law & Company to build a legal-specific model, securing contracts worth around 25 billion KRW in total. This reflects a fivefold increase compared to 2023, proving the potential for full-scale AI commercialization.
Additionally, Upstage announced overseas expansion strategies to spread the AI work standards established in Korea globally. Recently, in collaboration with KT, Upstage successfully built a Thai-specialized LLM for Jasmine Technology Solutions (JTS), a Thai IT company, marking the first domestic case of overseas sovereign AI businesses. This served as a meaningful opportunity to establish Upstage’s technological prowess globally and expand its influence in the Southeast Asian AI market.
Moreover, after establishing a US branch last year, Upstage expanded further by setting up a Japanese branch this March, developing Japanese-specific LLMs in joint ventures with local firms. Hiroyuki Matsushita, head of the Japanese branch, stated, “The Japanese AI solutions market is expected to grow to a scale of 17 trillion yen by 2030. We aim to lead the market with tailored local strategies based on Upstage’s document processing technology and small language models, which are competitive globally.”
Lastly, efforts to expand the ecosystem were emphasized. Recently, Upstage launched the ‘AI Initiative’ with AWS to expand the use of AI for public good and is actively investing in fostering AI talent by hosting hackathons and conducting joint research with leading universities domestically and overseas.
Kim concluded, “Upstage’s AI is not about replacing people but about supporting them to focus on more valuable work, thus creating technology for a better ‘future of work’.” He added, “We will continue to prove that AI, proven in Korea, can translate into real business outcomes in the global market.”