# Lucy Park

> Lucy Park (Eunjeong Park) is the co-founder and US CEO of Upstage, the first Korean generative AI startup to achieve unicorn status. A PhD in Data Mining from Seoul National University and MIT Innovators Under 35 honoree, she built KoNLPy - the go-to Korean NLP library used in classrooms and production systems across Korea - before leading the Papago machine translation team at NAVER. At Upstage, she drives the company's AI models and document intelligence products into enterprises across insurance, finance, legal and healthcare, with the company's Solar LLM powering mission-critical workflows globally.

- **Role:** US CEO & Co-founder at Upstage
- **Organizations:** Upstage, NAVER Corporation, Seoul National University, HKUST Guangzhou
- **Nationality:** Korean
- **Education:** B.S. in Industrial Engineering (major) & Economics (minor), Seoul National University, Exchange Student, University of Cambridge, M.S. in Data Mining, Seoul National University, Ph.D. in Data Mining, Seoul National University
- **Known for:** MIT Technology Review Innovators Under 35 (2021), Co-created KoNLPy (2014) - most widely used Korean NLP open-source library, Led Papago machine translation at NAVER, including honorific-sensitive translation

## Career timeline

- **2008** — Research Assistant at A.T. Kearney
- **2014** — Released KoNLPy - open-source Python package for Korean NLP, still widely used today
- **2015** — Intern at NCSOFT; Technical Advisor at Atilika; Lecturer at Seoul National University of Science and Technology
- **2016** — Completed Ph.D. in Data Mining, Seoul National University; joined NAVER Corp as Machine Learning Engineer
- **2016-2020** — Led Papago machine translation team at NAVER, building honorific-sensitive MT system
- **2020** — Co-founded Upstage as Chief Scientific Officer with CEO Sung-hoon Kim and CTO Stan Lee
- **2021** — Named MIT Innovators Under 35; joined HKUST GZ as Industry Faculty
- **2021** — Led KLUE (Korean Language Understanding Evaluation) benchmark initiative
- **2024** — Transitioned from CSO to Chief Product Officer at Upstage; named US CEO
- **2024** — Presented Solar Box at Qualcomm Snapdragon Summit (Nov)
- **2025** — Announced Solar Pro 2 with hybrid reasoning (May); speaking engagements at InsurTech Spring Conference
- **2026** — Upstage achieves unicorn status as Korea's first generative AI startup to exceed $1B valuation

## Achievements

- MIT Technology Review Innovators Under 35 (2021)
- Co-created KoNLPy (2014) - most widely used Korean NLP open-source library
- Led Papago machine translation at NAVER, including honorific-sensitive translation
- Co-authored KLUE: Korean Language Understanding Evaluation benchmark (2021)
- Released NSMC (Naver Sentiment Movie Corpus) - one of the largest Korean NLP datasets
- Co-founded Upstage which became Korea's first generative AI unicorn (2026)
- Under her product leadership, Upstage automated over 60% of insurance claims processing in Korea
- PyCon Korea keynote speaker (2019, 2014)
- Keynote at g0v Summit on Korean politics and data (2014)

## Latest updates

- **2026-04** — Upstage achieves unicorn status as Korea's first generative AI startup, completing $120M Series C led by Sagemaker Partners with total funding exceeding $326M
- **2026-03** — SK Networks invests additional 50 billion won in Upstage's Series C round
- **2025-05** — Announces Solar Pro 2 Preview - 31B parameter model with hybrid reasoning capabilities
- **2025-04** — Speaks at InsurTech Spring Conference on agentic information extraction
- **2025-04** — Solar Pro & Mini updated with stronger Korean language fluency
- **2025-01** — Presents 'Why Upstage Builds Small Language Models' at The New Stack
- **2024-11** — Presents Solar Box at Qualcomm Snapdragon Summit 2024
- **2024-09** — Announces Solar Pro Preview as most intelligent LLM on a single GPU

## Links

- Website: https://www.lucypark.kr/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/echojuliett
- Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/echojuliett
- GitHub: https://github.com/e9t
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/echojuliett

---

Profile page: https://yespress.io/lucy-park
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-05-16