2022/09/30 | Written by: Sungmin Park

In 2020, the news that star figures in the AI field collaborated to establish an AI startup became an industry hot topic. Upstage, born from this initiative, has now risen two digits and celebrated its 2nd anniversary alongside these stars. As we revisit Upstage’s founding story and its aspiration to challenge the Global Unicorn, we share the vision we will paint together.

AI Avengers, Uniting Through Upstage

Renowned worldwide for his ‘Deep Learning for Everyone’ lectures in Korea, CEO Sung Kim, a former professor at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and the head of Naver’s Clova AI, took his next step in founding the AI startup Upstage.

While working as a professor at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, he received acclaim by winning four best paper awards (ACM Sigsoft Distinguished paper) for his research on bug prediction and automatic source code generation, integrating software engineering with machine learning. He also cultivated talent, leading and expanding Naver Clova AI’s initial team of 3 to a scale of 150 members in 2017. In October 2020, amidst his career transition from professorship to the IT industry, he jumped into the new challenge of founding a startup with his colleagues.

CTO Stan Lee and CSO Lucy Park, who have joined forces with CEO Sung-hoon Kim, are also technology experts in the field of AI. CTO Stan Lee has experience leading Naver Clova’s Visual AI team, which handles computer vision technologies such as Optical Character Recognition (OCR), while CSO Lucy Park led the Papago modeling team at Naver, working on language-related AI.

In addition, experts from various fields with experience in leading domestic and international companies such as Meta, Amazon, Nvidia, eBay, Google, Apple, Kakao, and Naver have joined Upstage. Both Jae-Ho Lee, who worked as a software engineer at Bloomberg and Meta, and Chang-Hyun Min, a software development engineer from Amazon, saw the startup’s potential and decided to move from big tech companies in the United States to work at Upstage.

With the alliance of outstanding talents, Upstage demonstrated its excellent technical capabilities by winning its 10th gold medal at the ‘AI Olympics’ Kaggle competition, becoming the first Korean company to do so within a year and a half of its founding. Alongside Grandmaster Yoon-Soo Kim, who won the Kaggle Gold Medal in January last year, Won-Ho Song, Hyun-Byung Park, and Ik-Hyo Jung accomplished a valuable achievement by winning gold medals in 2022. Thanks to the assembly of these experts, Upstage has risen to become a company with solid technical prowess, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with global AI companies. The reason why experts from various fields with diverse experiences could gather in one place is because everyone resonated with the vision of Upstage.

Making AI Beneficial

While working at Naver, CEO Sung-hoon Kim met with various companies and learned that most companies, despite having large amounts of data and IT organizations, struggled to apply AI technology to their business due to a lack of experience. This realization soon became the incitation for the founding of Upstage.

The company name 'Upstage' embodies the ambition to bring various companies ‘Up’ to the stage of AI and to help domestic companies rise ‘Up’ to the global stage. As such, Upstage aims to assist in the acceleration of AI transformation in companies struggling with AI technology application, as well as to root AI technology across industries to make the world a better place. Just as we moved from a time when each household had one computer to an era where each person owns multiple PCs, we strive for innovation in the dissemination of advanced technology. A world where everyone can benefit from AI technology: This is the vision of Upstage.

Drawing an Era Where Anyone can Easily Utilize AI

Upstage, within less than a year since its founding, has received requests from over 100 companies in various fields such as finance, education, IT, and manufacturing. Through this, it was found that the range of technologies required in actual businesses could be categorized into three types: AI necessary for document recognition, recommendation systems for hyper-personalization, and a semantic-based search. Based on these findings, Upstage has advanced its business with the aim of providing AI technology that can be of practical help.

• Upstage AI Pack:

The ‘Upstage AI Pack,’ set to officially launch in the second half of this year, is a ‘no-code AI solution’ providing all systems essential for AI technology application in enterprises. Titled ‘One Package,’ this pack includes AI models, model managing systems, and data serving platforms, allowing corporate clients to easily apply AI technology without the need for developers or direct coding.

Upstage strives to innovate AI in businesses and various industries through its ‘Document AI’ system, which is designed to extract and recognize letters embedded in images and documents.

• AI Education

Furthermore, Upstage is sincerely committed to broadening the AI ecosystem, aiming to root AI innovation across all facets of our society. In this accelerating age of AI transformation, we conduct educational advancements to nurture future AI talents and collaborate with various companies, creating an inclusive AI ecosystem where anyone can freely participate.

Upstage, Accelerating AI Innovation in Business

Upstage’s efforts shine through its application in various businesses. Recently, the fashion tech company 'Brandi' has enhanced its hyper-personalization solution, which reflects consumer preferences, by introducing the ‘Upstage AI Pack’ developed based on no-code technology. In the process of technical validation, it is expected that transaction conversion rates related to click-through rates and sales will increase by up to double compared to the existing algorithm. This is anticipated to significantly contribute to Brandi’s actual future revenue.

Furthermore, in June of last year, Upstage signed a contract with 'LG Uplus' to perform sentiment enhanced tag-based recommendation and opinion-based search modeling. An AI engine was developed to analyze and search for emotional keywords in video content reviews. Additionally, Upstage is collaborating with various major industrial clients such as Kookmin Bank; Amorepacific; Glorang, the operator of the kids’ education platform Gguge; and AI semiconductor startup Furiosa AI in various aspects.

AI is a field that develops every day, to the extent that it is difficult to predict the outcomes of even a few months ahead. Despite this environment, Upstage is paving the road of innovation to enable more companies and individuals to utilize AI and transform the world. Like Neil Armstrong, who first set foot on the surface of the moon, we look to the future, exploring and anticipating that point in advance, and strive to create greater AI products that will make this a near reality. Until the day we achieve ‘Making AI Beneficial’, Upstage’s challenge continues.

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