Upstage Co., Ltd. () is a South Korean artificial intelligence company founded in 2020.
Upstage was established in 2020 by Sung Kim, a former professor at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Kim also led Naver's Clova team before founding the company. Upstage secured 31.6 billion won in Series A funding in 2021, followed by 100 billion won in Series B funding in 2024. The funding received support from SoftBank Ventures Asia, Korea Development Bank, KT Corporation, and Mirae Asset Venture Investment.
In December 2023, Upstage introduced Solar, a small language model with 10.7 billion parameters. Solar Pro 2 was released in July 2025, marking South KoreaâÂÂs first large language model recognized as a frontier model. Solar Pro 2 has taken the global stage, outperforming leading models such as GPT-4.1 and DeepSeek V3.