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.
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.