South Korea’s AI foundation model startup Upstage has secured a 560 billion won investment commitment from the National Growth Fund, marking the fund’s second direct equity investment and the largest single infusion into a domestic AI model company to date. The funding is structured as a public-private co-investment: 100 billion won from the Advanced Strategic Industry Fund, 30 billion won from the Korea Development Bank (KDB), and 430 billion won from private investors including SK Networks, Sajé Partners, Woori Venture Partners, and Mirae Asset. The Financial Services Commission approved the deal at a National Growth Fund investment review committee meeting held on April 30.
Upstage, founded in 2020 and headquartered in Yongin, Gyeonggi Province, is the developer of Solar, a large language model (LLM) that has gained traction in enterprise AI applications. The company was the only startup selected among Korea’s National Representative AI companies by the government last year, and with this latest round, its cumulative funding now stands at approximately 400 billion won following its Series C first close earlier in April.
The investment will be directed primarily toward advancing the performance of Upstage’s Korean-language AI models and expanding its training data pipeline. As part of the strategy, Upstage plans to partner with a major domestic portal company to access hundreds of millions of high-quality search queries and contextual data to improve its Korean-language model capabilities.
