Upstage is a South Korea-born, US-expanding AI company building Solar - a family of frontier large language models - alongside Document AI tools that turn messy PDFs, scans, and contracts into structured data for enterprise workflows.
Shawn Heide is a Boston-based entrepreneur who blends culinary creativity with digital storytelling and enterprise AI. As co-founder of 9muse Creative Studio, he crafts cinematic brand films for companies across New England. His culinary arc spans founding Wagwan Jerk Bar in 2017 — a Caribbean-meets-New England pop-up launched at Boston farmers markets — to directing culinary operations at The Kitchen at White Barn, a Neapolitan pizza restaurant grown from a working farm. Pursuing his MBA at Babson F.W. Olin Graduate School of Business, Shawn is also connected to Upstage AI, the enterprise AI company known for document intelligence and large language models that raised a $120M Series C in early 2026.
Sung Kim (김성훈), known professionally as Hun Kim, is the Co-Founder and CEO of Upstage AI, South Korea's first generative AI unicorn. A former HKUST professor and founding head of Naver Clova AI, he co-founded Upstage in October 2020 to solve the gap between enterprise data and practical AI deployment. Under his leadership, Upstage developed Solar - a compact 10.7B parameter language model - and Solar Pro 2, which outperforms GPT-4.1 at half the compute cost. With $326M in total funding and a Series C close in early 2026, Upstage is positioning itself as a global AI frontier company focused on enterprise document intelligence and AI agents.
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.
Dan Ashton is the CEO and Co-Founder of Brain Co., a San Francisco-based AI company that builds applied intelligence platforms for the world's most complex institutions - from government permit offices to hospital systems. He brought his AI startup Serene AI into Brain Co.'s orbit and now leads a company backed by $30M in Series A funding from Elad Gil, Affinity Partners, Patrick Collison, Reid Hoffman, and Andrej Karpathy. Before Brain Co., he was an early operator at three unicorns - Opendoor, Faire, and Clubhouse - and a McKinsey consultant before that. Brain Co. has already deployed AI that unlocks $375M annually in permitting value and mitigated $100M+ in supply chain losses.