Ai Startup Upstage Completes Series A 31.6 Billion Won Investment Attraction
2021/09/02COMPANY K PARTNERS, SOFTBANK VENTURES, PRIMER SAJE, TBT, PREMIER, STONEBRIDGE VENTURES, ETC. PARTICIPATED
THE DIFFERENTIATED AI PRODUCT CONCEPT, ADVANCED TECHNOLOGY OF AI EXPERTS, AND HIGH BUSINESS POTENTIAL WERE EVALUATED
Plan to attract large-scale development personnel to provide 'AI Pack', a solution that anyone can easily use AI
(Upstage=9/2/2021) Upstage, an AI startup that helps companies focus on their own core business, said on 1 January that it had attracted an investment of 31.6 billion won in the Series A round.
Large domestic and foreign investors such as Company K Partners, Softbank Ventures, Primer Corporation, TBT, Premier, and Stonebridge Ventures participated in this investment. Through this investment attraction, Upstage has been recognized for its outstanding technological competitiveness and unrivaled AI expertise for corporate AI introduction, as well as the potential and practical value of the AI integrated solution 'AI Pack' being developed by Upstage. It is interpreted that it has been evaluated for its high potential as a leading company leading the advancement of
UPSTAGE, WHICH HAS BEEN ESTABLISHED FOR A YEAR SINCE ITS ESTABLISHMENT IN OCTOBER OF THIS YEAR, HAS BEEN RECEIVING HIGH EXPECTATIONS FROM OVER 100 COMPANIES WISHING TO INTRODUCE AI. SINCE ITS ESTABLISHMENT, IT HAS SUCCESSFULLY INTRODUCED AI TO VARIOUS CUSTOMERS IN VARIOUS FIELDS SUCH AS FINANCE, EDUCATION, AND DISTRIBUTION, AND ACHIEVED SALES OF KRW 8.8 BILLION WITHIN EIGHT MONTHS OF ESTABLISHMENT.
In addition, Upstage won five gold medals at the Kaggle AI contest in which 6 million machine learning developers around the world participate, solidifying its position in AI technology in the global market. In addition, to expand the AI market, the Naver Connect Foundation and AI developers are operating training, and while developing KLUE, which can evaluate the Korean language ability of AI, it is open for free to anyone to use, accelerating the development of the Korean natural language processing field. also contributed to
Upstage will take this investment as an opportunity to focus on recruiting talent to accelerate AI Pack development. By 2022, large-scale recruitment of more than 200 domestic and foreign AI developers, as well as software and research engineers for system and solution development, will begin. In addition, in November, we plan to actively select professional research personnel.
Company K Partners Vice President Jun-Young Byun, who led this investment, said, “Through Upstage’s AI Pack, any company in the world can conveniently build AI services using their own data, and decided to invest in the belief that a convenient world will come through technological innovation. "The AI industry is the next big thing with definite growth," he said.
“AI TECHNOLOGY IS BECOMING MORE POPULAR AND MANY COMPANIES ARE IN NEED OF AI SOLUTIONS THAT CAN BE APPLIED TO THEIR SERVICES,” SAID YUN-JEONG JIN, MANAGING DIRECTOR OF SOFTBANK VENTURES, WHO LED THE INVESTMENT TOGETHER. “UPSTAGE’S ABILITY TO DEVELOP AI MODELS AND OPERATE INFRASTRUCTURE BASED ON THIS, WE EXPECT TO QUICKLY DOMINATE THE MARKET.”
Upstage CEO Kim Seong-hoon said, “We plan to actively provide AI Packs that advance AI service models so that each company can focus on their own core business. , we will do our best to build an environment where technological innovation through AI Pack can advance each industry.”
Meanwhile, Upstage was founded by former Naver Clova AI leader Kim Seong-hoon, former Naver Clova OCR/Visual leader Lee Hwan-seok, and former Papago translator modeling leader Park Eun-jung. Since its establishment in October 2020, it has established a Hong Kong branch and is actively recruiting global talent. In order to secure future competitiveness, we plan to strengthen the organizational system and expand the scope of entry into global markets such as Japan, the Americas, and Southeast Asia using this as a base.
▶ ATTACHMENT 1: AI STARTUP UPSTAGE COMPLETES SERIES A 31.6 BILLION WON INVESTMENT ATTRACTION
Contact
Upstage | Geun-Kyo Kim PR Director | 010-8229-7240 | keunkyo@upstage.ai
-
Founded in October 2020, Upstage identifies areas that can be innovated through AI technology among corporate problems and provides consulting including basic AI model and system construction required for this. In addition, by supporting the nurturing of AI talents within customer companies, it will help companies with successful AI transformation by improving their own AI competitiveness. Furthermore, the company plans to actively design AI teams by nurturing differentiated professional talents who can be immediately put into AI business through hands-on training that melts AI business experience and solid AI basic training.
CEO Seong-Hoon Kim developed Kachine, an early search engine in Korea, and co-founded Nara Vision, Inc. Since then, while serving as a professor at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, he won the ACM Sigsoft Distinguished Paper Award 4 times, the best paper award, for research on bug prediction and automatic source code generation that converges software engineering and machine learning. He is a world-class scholar in software engineering and AI, winning influential thesis awards. He is also widely known as a deep learning instructor for everyone, which has recorded more than 6 million views in total.
Upstage's co-founders include CTO Lee Hal-seok, who led Naver Visual AI / OCR and achieved global results, and CSO Park Eun-jung, who led the model team of Papago, the world's best translator.