Discover how Upstage Raises a $72 million windfall, leveraging cutting-edge AI solutions to power innovation and drive success in the tech industry.
Upstage, a leading artificial intelligence startup that specializes in large language models and document processing, has scored a $72 million windfall to bankroll its expansion efforts. This Series B round nearly tripled the amount raised in Upstage’s previous funding effort, underscoring investor confidence in the company’s vision and capabilities.
Upstage’s flagship model, Solar LLM, has earned acclaim for its lightning-fast performance and cost-efficiency. The company also offers a solution called Document AI, which uses optical character recognition to enable businesses to efficiently scan physical and digital documents.
Solar LLM
The funding will help Upstage accelerate the development of LLMs purpose-trained for global enterprises. It will also help the company establish a new office in San Jose, California. The Series B round was led by SK Networks and KT, with participation from Korea Development Bank, Shinhan Venture Investment, Hana Ventures, Mirae Asset Venture Investment, and Industrial Bank of Korea. Existing investors, including SBVA (formerly SoftBank Ventures Asia), Primer Sazze Partners, Company K Partners, and Premier Partners, reaffirmed their confidence in the company’s vision and capabilities.
Upstage’s flagship large language model, Solar LLM, has gained recognition for its lightning-fast performance and cost-efficiency. The model is built using Upstage’s Depth-Up Scaling technique and has been used by numerous enterprises in high-growth industries like finance and healthcare. It is capable of handling documents that contain unconventional attributes, such as rotation or slant. It can even interpret a document that is in the shape of a circle.
This demonstrates the power of Upstage’s approach to AI. By combining multiple models, it can achieve better results than traditional methods. This makes it easier for users to create a custom AI solution that matches their business needs. The system also offers critical safeguards that ensure content safety, privacy, and factual accuracy.
In addition to ensuring the integrity of information, Upstage’s system can also automatically filter out any potential biases that may be introduced by the application of a specific algorithm. This will enable users to build applications that are safe for use in their personal lives and in the workplace.
In the past, many organizations were concerned about existing biases in their AI tools. They also worried about how these tools would be propagated into agency decision making processes. As a result, they sought to develop a set of guidelines to improve the quality of their AI tools. Some of these guidelines focused on addressing problems such as hallucination prevention, common sense interference, and contextual understanding. Others focused on establishing clear and measurable performance metrics for AI models.
Document AI
Document AI is a powerful solution for automating business processes and analysing unstructured documents. It combines optical character recognition, natural language processing, and machine learning to capture and process data from a variety of document formats, including PDF files. The technology helps businesses streamline their workflows and make better decisions based on real-time information. It can also help eliminate unnecessary steps, improve data validation, and reduce operational costs. Document AI can be easily integrated with other Google Cloud products, including BigQuery and Vertex AI Search, and doesn’t require special data science skills to use.
This technology can significantly reduce the time spent on manual data entry, parsing, and classifying documents. It can even identify patterns in data that might be difficult to spot by humans, such as duplicate entries or missing information. This makes it an ideal tool for organisations that need to manage a large volume of data or whose documents are inconsistent. It can also help you improve your customer service and increase efficiency by analyzing the results of surveys or other feedback forms.
In addition to reducing manual tasks, Document AI can help you save money by streamlining your document processing workflows. For example, it can automatically convert PDF files to text and perform Optical Character Recognition (OCR) on them to find specific words or phrases. This can significantly cut down your overhead, allowing you to invest more funds in other areas of the business.
The solution can also improve the accuracy of your OCR processes by using advanced layout analysis to detect complex document structures. It can also support multiple languages and document formats, making it a great choice for businesses with international operations. It also offers a number of pre-trained models for different types of documents and customizable training options, so you can get started right away.
The company’s technology can also handle documents with unconventional attributes, such as rotation, slant, or wrinkles. This enables it to analyze more complex documents and provide more accurate analysis than traditional solutions, which are often limited to structured data such as spreadsheets. The new funding round will allow Upstage to expand its efforts abroad, leveraging its expertise in document processing and large language models.
AI-powered document processing engine
Upstage’s document processing engine, Solar, combines large language models with optical character recognition to process documents of various formats. This enables it to identify the information needed to categorize documents and automate workflows. Using AI-powered document processing, companies can cut costs by eliminating manual processes and reducing human error.
Document processing is a critical process in any business. AI can help streamline it and eliminate errors by identifying key data points in documents, converting them into structured data, and integrating it into other systems and databases. It can also help businesses improve their processes at a strategic and tactical level.
Unlike traditional methods, AI document processing can easily handle large volumes of data and ensure accuracy. It can also adapt to evolving document formats and industry-specific terminology. This allows it to scale with businesses and maintain high efficiency levels as they grow. It is especially valuable for organizations that must adhere to regulatory compliance standards and customer service guidelines.
As more and more organizations use the power of AI to streamline their processes, they are looking for ways to capitalize on the technology. They need a document processing solution that can keep up with the volume of work and meet deadlines. Document AI can help them do this by automating document-based processes and providing accurate information in real time.
The new funding will enable Upstage to further develop LLMs purpose-trained for global enterprises. It will also invest in a new office in San Jose, California to support growth across the US, Japan, and Southeast Asia. The company’s current investors, including SK Networks and KT, are participating in the Series B round.
A smart AI engine is designed to understand the documents and their unique structures, layouts, and languages. This enables it to recognize document patterns and extract the most relevant data points. It can then validate that the extracted data is correct by comparing it against predefined rules and databases. This makes it an ideal document processing system for businesses of all sizes and industries.
The main advantage of an AI-powered document processing system is its ability to accurately and quickly classify documents into different categories. For example, it can categorize invoices and purchase orders based on their content, or route legal documents like contracts to the appropriate department. It can even detect important text such as names, dates, and amounts, enabling businesses to make data-driven decisions.
Investors
The Series B round of funding for Upstage Co Ltd, a South Korean startup specializing in document processing and large language models, marks an important milestone for the company. This latest influx of capital will support the company’s global expansion efforts. The investment also reflects the growing recognition of Upstage’s innovative technology. The new funding round also triples the amount Upstage raised in its previous fundraising effort, underscoring investor confidence in the company’s vision and potential.
Upstage’s flagship product, Solar LLM, has earned acclaim for its lightning-fast performance and cost-efficiency. The company’s solutions also include Document AI, an optical character recognition tool that has found demand in high-growth industries like finance and healthcare. The new funding will enable Upstage to further develop LLMs purpose-trained for global enterprises.
The round was led by SK Networks and KT Corp. Additional backers included Korea Development Bank, Shinhan Venture Investment Co, Hana Ventures, Mirae Asset Venture Investment, and IBK Securities. Existing investors SBVA (formerly SoftBank Ventures Asia), Primer Sazze Partners, Company K Partners, and Premier Partners participated in the round as well, reaffirming their support for Upstage’s vision and technology.