Upstage Secures $45M Funding and Partners with AWS to Expand AI-Powered Document Intelligence

Upstage bags $45M to expand its AI-native document intelligence suite to the US - SiliconANGLE

Upstage bags $45M to expand its AI-native document intelligence suite to the US The South Korean document intelligence startup Upstage Co. Ltd. wants to expand into the U.S. after raising $45 million in a Series B bridge round. Today's round, led by the Korea Development Bank and the venture capital arms of Amazon.com Inc. and Advanced Micro Devices Inc., comes 16 months after Upstage announced the completion of a $72 million Series B investment. It brings the startup's total amount raised so far to $157 million. Upstage is the creator of a Document Intelligence suite that incorporates artificial intelligence features such as Document Parse, used to transform unstructured documents, including paper files, into structured formats that are ready for use by large language models. Another feature is Information Extract, which employs optical character recognition technology to identify and pull key data points from raw text. The platform can process high-variation document packets such as policies, contracts, financial statements, invoices and emails with an impressive 99% accuracy. According to the company, that can substantially reduce the need for workers to spend time on manual data entry, while generating insights to help automate decision-making. Upstage says that its platform is different to traditional OCR tools, which can only extract static information without any understanding of context. Instead, it looks at each document and interpret it in a holistic way, meaning that it can understand the layout, meaning and purpose of what it's seeing. It's uniquely able to recognize not just text, but also things like checkboxes and graphs, even on paper documents where the text is skewed, rotated or slanted, or where the paper itself is wrinkled. Because of this, Upstage says its platform is ideal for any organization that has boxes stuffed full of old paper files waiting to be digitized. However, its primary focus is on the insurance industry, which it says is ripe for an AI-driven digital revolution. It cites a recent study that found U.S. insurance companies spent $25.7 billion on adjudication costs last year, with $18 billion of that tied to overturned denials and unnecessary review cycles. The reason for this is that much of this work is performed manually by humans working with stacks of paper documents and fragmented systems, Upstage says. So this is where it wants to help. "Most enterprise teams are still buried in document chaos," said Upstage's head of U.S. business Kasey Roh. "We bring structure and speed to that mess, helping carriers and brokers move faster, reduce costs and serve clients with confidence." The startup has already achieved a lot of success in South Korea, serving dozens of its top insurance firms as well as Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. and a number of government agencies. Now, it has its eyes fixated on the U.S. market, and to seize that opportunity it has forged a close partnership with Amazon Web Services Inc., naming it as its preferred cloud provider. Going forward, it's hoping to improve its underlying Solar LLM family of AI models, which are the secret sauce that powers its Document Intelligence suite. The Solar models were built on the Amazon SageMaker platform and can be downloaded via the Amazon Bedrock marketplace. Upstage also plans to utilize that company's machine learning infrastructure to enhance the quality of its models further and develop new agentic capabilities. Upstage co-founder and Chief Executive Sung Kim said today's round is a pivotal moment for the company and for enterprise generative AI. "The next phase of AI is about performance, precision and readiness for real-world complexity, and this is exactly what we have built with our suite," he said. "Our collaboration with AWS brings scale, credibility and deep technical alignment, which is critical as we deliver production-ready AI in high-stakes sectors like insurance."

Amazon com : Upstage and AWS Join Forces to Drive AI Innovation in APAC and the United States

SAN JOSE, Calif. August 19, 2025 - Upstage today announced a strategic collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to drive co-sales and go-to-market efforts while advancing the development of its Solar language models to broaden access to high-performance, cost-effective generative AI technology across the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region and the United States. In addition, Amazon will make a minority investment in Upstage, a milestone that underscores Upstage's technical leadership and growing influence in the region. Under this collaboration, Upstage will work with AWS as its preferred cloud provider to build, train, and deploy its future foundation models. The company will leverage AWS's world-leading machine learning infrastructure, including Amazon SageMaker, AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips, to scale its large language model (LLM), Solar, and a suite of AI-powered document processing solutions. "Upstage and AWS have built a strong foundation through years of collaboration, and this agreement represents a new chapter in our shared vision to accelerate AI innovation globally," said Sung Kim, CEO and co-founder of Upstage. "With AWS as our strategic partner, we're poised to scale our impact and bring secure, intelligent, and high-performing AI solutions to more organizations in the public sector." Together, the companies aim to empower governments, public agencies, and regulated industries with best-in-class generative AI solutions, optimized for the performance, security, and the compliance needs of the public sector. As part of the agreement, Upstage and AWS will collaborate on go-to-market strategies and co-selling efforts across APAC and the US. "AWS is excited to enable Upstage to unleash a new wave of innovation", said Jon Jones, VP and Global Head of Startups and Venture Capital at AWS. "From our fully-managed AI services to purpose-built chips for training and inferencing of foundation models, Upstage is leveraging AWS to uplevel how public sector stakeholders apply AI to improve efficiency and productivity, while keeping everybody's data safe and secure." This agreement builds on years of successful collaboration. Upstage has long utilized Amazon SageMaker to train its Solar models, significantly reducing training time through advanced data pre-processing and continued pre-training techniques. The company also implemented its proprietary Depth-Up Scaling (DUS) method using AWS infrastructure, enabling more efficient scaling and improved model performance. Upstage's flagship Solar family of models, including the 10.7B-parameter Solar Mini and 22B-parameter Solar Pro, are available in Amazon Bedrock Marketplace, Amazon SageMaker JumpStart, and AWS Marketplace. These models are already being deployed by hundreds of organizations across finance, healthcare, legal, education and government sectors in Korea, other countries in the APAC and the US region, and beyond to accelerate AI-powered digital transformation. "Upstage has established itself as a key AI innovator in the Asia-Pacific region. With this investment, we are excited to support Upstage's next phase of growth as they scale their Solar foundation models and document processing solutions," said Abhijeet Muzumdar, Vice President, Corporate Development at Amazon. "Sung Kim and his team are delivering impressive AI technology that's already helping several organizations across multiple sectors, and we're committed to fostering continued innovation in generative AI by supporting visionary companies like Upstage." Upstage recently launched Solar Pro 2, its 31B-parameter flagship language model designed for complex reasoning and agentic task execution. The model features a hybrid architecture with dual modes - Chat Mode for rapid responses and Reasoning Mode for structured multi-step logical thinking, enhancing performance in mathematics, coding, and logic-intensive workflows. Solar Pro 2 demonstrates strong Korean language understanding with cultural awareness for specialized fields like finance, law, and healthcare, while functioning as an agentic system capable of autonomously executing multi-step workflows through external tool integration. Beyond its flagship language model, Upstage is providing its enterprise-grade document processing solution Document Intelligenceon AWS Marketplace's AI Agents & Tools category. This agentic AI tool is designed to instantly extract key information from documents with varying layouts such as contracts, invoices, forms, and financial statements, and transform unstructured text data into structured formats like HTML and Markdown, making them readily usable for downstream AI applications. In line with their shared commitment, Upstage and AWS also co-launched the AI Initiativein April, aimed at accelerating generative AI adoption across educational institutions and nonprofit organizations. As part of the program, Upstage offers free API access to its full suite of AI models, while AWS provides complimentary infrastructure support and tools such as AWS Skill Builder and PartyRock, an experimental generative AI sandbox powered by Amazon Bedrock. Over 200 organizations including Seoul National University and Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) have already joined the initiative. ### About Upstage At Upstage, our mission is to build intelligence for the future of work. With frontier-level advanced language models and enterprise-grade document processing engines, we help organizations redefine the way they work - making processes smarter, more efficient, and ultimately more human-centered. We're a dynamic team of 100+ top AI researchers, engineers, and business leaders with a proven track record of building AI solutions trusted by major enterprises worldwide. Our team collaborates remotely, with hubs in Seoul, San Francisco, and Tokyo.