Nvidia will take part in an investment round being carried out by South Korean AI model developer Upstage and Motif Technologies.

AI company Upstage said on Nov. 9 it expects to receive investment from Nvidia in its ongoing Series C second-round funding. It did not disclose the amount.

Upstage will thereby add Nvidia as an investor after Amazon and AMD.

Upstage said it was valued at more than 1 trillion won in April and completed a 180 billion won Series C first-round funding.

Upstage plans to use funds raised through the Series C round to advance its in-house AI models such as Solar, recruit key talent at home and abroad, and expand its push into overseas markets including the United States and Japan.

Upstage CEO Sung-hoon Kim (김성훈) said, "I am glad to welcome Nvidia as a new investor." He said, "As we have shown that AI models made in Korea work in global settings as well, we will use this planned investment as a springboard to further strengthen the competitiveness of our in-house AI models and grow into an AI company that leads the global market."

Motif Technologies also said on the same day that it has completed raising bridge-round funding to develop its next-generation foundation LLM, Motif 4, with participation expected from existing investors and Nvidia.

Motif plans to release Motif 4, the follow-up to its open-weight model Motif 3 announced in August, as an open-weight model in the first quarter of next year.

Motif CEO Jeong-hwan Lim (임정환) said, "With the global competition to improve models recently becoming fierce, the only way to survive in the global frontier race is to create differentiation at every stage, from architecture to post-training." He said, "Through Motif 4, we will demonstrate our capabilities to independently build a top-tier global frontier model."