Upstage founding story
2022/09/30⏱ 5mins -
Haley (Content Communication)
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Those who are curious about what kind of company Upstage is
Those who are curious about the founding story and vision of Upstage
THOSE WHO ARE INTERESTED IN THE FIELD OF AI
THOSE WHO HAVE CONCERNS ABOUT INTRODUCING AI
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Celebrating the second anniversary of startup 'Upstage', we share our founding story and vision.
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✔️ AI AVENGERS UNITE UPSTAGE (UPSTAGE CO-FOUNDER INTRODUCTION)
✔️ Making AI Beneficial (Upstage's Mission)
✔️ DRAWING AN ERA WHERE ANYONE CAN EASILY INTRODUCE AI (UPSTAGE'S VISION)
✔️ UPSTAGE ACCELERATES AI INNOVATION IN BUSINESS (UPSTAGE CLIENTS AND PARTNERS)
In 2020, the news that people with great histories in the field of AI gathered together to establish an AI startup became a hot topic in the industry. Upstage, which was born in this way, celebrated its 2nd anniversary this year with the stars who have grown to double digits. We look back on the founding story of Upstage, challenging the global AI unicorn, and share the vision we will draw together.
AI AVENGERS UNITE UPSTAGE
(From left) CSO Park Eun-jung, CEO Kim Seong-hoon, CTO Lee Hal-seok / Photo by ⓒPaul-in, Choi Ji-hoon
Seong- Hoon Kim , a global scholar who is well known for his lectures on 'Deep Learning for Everyone' in Korea, took the path of starting an AI startup upstage as the Next Step after going through the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology Professor and Naver Clova AI head.
While working as a professor at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology , he won the best paper award (ACM Sigsoft Distinguished paper) four times for research on bug prediction and automatic source code generation that converges software engineering and machine learning. He also led the team from 3 people to 150 people. In the midst of making a career from a professor to an IT giant, in October 2020, I jumped into the new challenge of starting a startup with my colleagues.
CTO Lee Hwalsuk and CSO Park Eun-jung, who came together with Kim Sung-hoon, are also technical experts who have worked in the field of AI. CTO Lee has experience leading the Visual AI team, an organization that covers all aspects of computer vision technology, including Naver Clova's Optical Character Recognition (OCR), while Park Eun-jung CSO led the Papago model team at Naver where she worked on language-related AI.
In addition , experts from each field with history in domestic and foreign companies such as Meta, Amazon, Nvidia, eBay, Google, Apple, Kakao, and Naver gathered upstage. Jaeho Lee, who worked as a software engineer at Bloomberg and Meta, and Changhyun Min, a software development engineer at Amazon, also saw the future potential and decided to move from a big tech company in the United States to a startup upstage.
With the confluence of outstanding talents, Upstage became the first Korean company to win the 10th gold medal in the 'AI Olympics' Kaggle competition within a year and a half of its founding, promoting its outstanding technology. Grand Master Kim Yun-soo, who won the Kaggle Gold Medal in January last year, as well as Masters Won-ho Song, Hyun-byeong Park, and Ik-hyo Jeong, achieved a valuable achievement by winning gold medals in 2022. Thanks to the gathering of talented people, Upstage has leapt to become a company with solid technology that can stand shoulder to shoulder with global AI companies. The reason that experts in each field with such diverse experiences were able to gather in one place was because everyone shared the vision of Upstage.
Making AI Beneficial
Upstage's Mission, Making AI Beneficial
While working at Naver, CEO Kim Seong-hoon met several companies and learned that most companies are having difficulties in applying AI technology to business despite having large amounts of data and IT organizations due to lack of experience in AI business. Realized. This soon led to the birth of Upstage.
The company name, Upstage, means to bring various companies up to the stage of AI, and it also contains the aspiration to contribute so that domestic companies can go up on the global stage as well. As such, Upstage aims to contribute to accelerating AI transformation for companies that are having difficulties in applying AI technology, and to challenge valuable work that makes the world better by transplanting AI technology throughout the industry . Just as we enjoy the era of having N PCs per person from the days of having one computer per household, we strive to innovate the dissemination of cutting-edge technology. A world where everyone can benefit from AI technology, this is the vision of Upstage.
DRAWING AN ERA WHERE ANYONE CAN EASILY INTRODUCE AI
Upstage receives a request for advice on the introduction of AI technology from more than 100 companies in various fields such as finance, education, IT, and manufacturing before less than a year since its foundation, and the categories of technologies required in actual business are selected into three categories. was able to verify that. These are AI necessary for document recognition, a recommendation system for hyper-personalization, and semantic-based search. Based on this, Upstage has advanced its business for the purpose of dealing with AI technology that can be of practical help .
The 'Upstage AI Pack', which is about to be officially released in the second half of this year, provides all the systems essential for corporate AI technology application, including AI models, model management systems, and data and serving platforms, as 'One Package'. It is a 'no-code AI solution' that allows corporate customers to easily apply AI technology without having to do it directly.
Upstage is striving to achieve innovation through AI in businesses in various industries through ' Document AI ' , which contains a technology-building system that extracts and recognizes letters contained in images or documents.
AI Education :
In addition, Upstage is sincerely committed to expanding the base of the AI ecosystem so that AI innovation can take root in all areas of our society. Now that the AI transformation is accelerating, we are conducting education to nurture future AI talent , working with various companies, and creating an AI ecosystem in which anyone can freely participate.
UPSTAGE ACCELERATES AI TRANSFORMATION IN BUSINESSES
Upstage clients and partners
Upstage's hard work has actually been applied to several businesses and is paying off. Recently, fashion tech company 'Brandi' introduced the product recommendation AI solution of the 'Upstage AI Pack' developed based on no-code , and advanced the super-personalized recommendation solution reflecting customer preferences . In the process of technical verification, the click-through rate and transaction conversion rate related to sales increased up to 2 times compared to the existing algorithm, which is expected to contribute significantly to the actual sales of Brandi.
In addition, LG Uplus signed a contract with LG Uplus in June to perform emotional tag extraction and opinion-based search modeling, working together to develop an AI engine that analyzes and searches the emotional keywords of video content reviews. In addition, the company is collaborating in many ways with corporate clients from various major industries, such as Kookmin Bank, Amorepacific, Glorang, the operator of the kids' education platform Gguge, and Furiosa AI, a startup specializing in AI semiconductors.
AI is a field that is developing day by day to the extent that it is difficult to predict a few months from now. Even in this environment, Upstage is paving the way for innovation so that more businesses and people can use AI to change the world. Like Neil Armstrong, who first set foot on the surface of the moon, we look to the future, explore that point in advance, and strive to create better AI products to make this a not-too-distant reality. Upstage's challenge continues until the day when the world's Making AI Beneficial is achieved.
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Under the mission of 'Making AI beneificial', Upstage is developing AI products such as OCR Pack and Recommendation Pack to create a better world with AI. Check the Upstage website for more information.
