en.Wedoany.com Reported - South Korean AI startup Upstage, after becoming the country's first unicorn with a valuation exceeding 1 trillion KRW (approximately 5.1 billion RMB), has recently acquired the portal site "Daum" and the general-purpose AI agent platform "Timely," accelerating its transformation into a comprehensive AI platform company connecting AI models, agents, and portals.
Upstage plans to integrate its self-developed AI foundation model "Solar" with B2C and B2B operations to build a sovereign AI ecosystem covering both enterprises and individuals. At a press conference held at the Conrad Seoul Hotel on Yeouido, Seoul, on the 16th, Upstage disclosed the performance data of the preview version of its open-source model "Solar Open 2." The model was developed through the "Independent AI Foundation Model (독자 AI 파운데이션 모델, 독파모)" project of the Ministry of Science and ICT (MSIT). Upstage CEO Kim Sung-hoon stated that the Solar Open 2 preview scored 44.4 points on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index (AAII), a level similar to Anthropic's Claude Sonnet 4.6 and OpenAI's GPT-5.
In terms of agent capability, the Solar Open 2 preview achieved a score of 98% on the Tau2-Bench metric, surpassing DeepSeek V4 Pro's 96.2% and approaching Anthropic Fable 5's 98.5%. Upstage plans to launch Solar Open 2 at the end of this month and the commercial model Solar Pro 4 next month. Kim Sung-hoon also suggested that the focus of AI competition is shifting from model performance to practical work applications, and the company plans to operate a process-based agent platform called "Upstage Studio" that allows modular combination of workflows to capture the enterprise work automation market. In practical applications, this platform can reduce the time required to analyze patient records from other hospitals from 20 minutes to under 5 minutes.
Regarding the portal site Daum, Lee Kun-soo, head of Upstage's AI Search division and CEO of AXZ, the company operating Daum, unveiled a blueprint to transform Daum into an "AI agent-oriented portal." Daum possesses approximately 36 years of news data, 30,000 to 50,000 new news articles daily, and dictionaries in 26 languages, with over 10 million weekly users. Upstage plans to integrate its AI models with Daum services, shifting towards a "hybrid search" paradigm where AI agents autonomously combine keywords and context to find answers. Lee Kun-soo stated that an "AI Overview" feature will be introduced to summarize search results and present them as answers, and vertical searches based on practical databases like shopping, food, and travel will be strengthened to solve users' life problems. Regarding the partnership with KakaoMap and ShoppingHow, which were excluded during the Daum acquisition, Lee Kun-soo added that while the company will cooperate with KakaoMap and ShoppingHow in principle, it is also in extensive discussions with other partners, leaving multiple possibilities open.
The work-oriented AI agent Timely is targeting the era of "one agent per person." Timely CEO Kim Dae-hwan stated that the platform requires no coding; users can build their work environment with just clicks, and the core is transforming individual AI usage experiences into organizational assets. Based on various language models including Solar, Timely offers AI agents for image/video generation, document conversion, etc., and is already used in approximately 600 local governments, public institutions, and educational institutions across South Korea.
Regarding the Initial Public Offering (IPO), Upstage selected KB Securities and Mirae Asset Securities as lead underwriters last December. Kim Sung-hoon stated that internal discussions on the specific direction are ongoing. CFO Jin Yun-kyung noted that funds raised from the IPO will be used to purchase Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) and for overall business operating expenses.
Founded in 2020 by Kim Sung-hoon, former head of Naver Clova AI, Upstage initially focused on Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and document parsing technology, capable of processing unstructured documents in the finance, insurance, and legal sectors with 99% accuracy. At the end of 2023, its large language model Solar ranked first globally on the Hugging Face Open LLM Leaderboard. Currently, Upstage is the only startup selected for South Korea's "Independent AI Foundation Model (독파모)" project, competing alongside SK Telecom, LG AI Research Institute, and others in the national representative AI development race. Including a 100 billion KRW investment from the National Growth Fund's Advanced Strategic Fund, Upstage has attracted cumulative investments of approximately 730 billion KRW, becoming South Korea's first AI unicorn.
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