Upstage, an artificial intelligence (AI) startup, said it aims to compete with sovereign AI in the global technology hegemony race.

Upstage CEO Kim Sung-hoon (김성훈) said at a media day held on June 16 at the Conrad Hotel in Yeouido, Seoul, that AI has become a national strategic asset rather than a service or a tool. He said any country can cut it off if it chooses, and that South Korea should raise its own technology as much as it can.

He cited a recent move by the U.S. administration to fully block foreigners from accessing Anthropic’s Fable5 and Mythos5, stressing the need for South Korean sovereign AI.

Kim underscored South Korea’s neutral position in the AI hegemony rivalry between the United States and China. He said that to avoid being hurt in a fight between whales, it should become a big shrimp. He said South Korea has more opportunities with its image as a neutral country, and that many countries in Europe, the Middle East and Asia, rather than the United States and China, are contacting Upstage to design AI together.

He added that South Korea is an AI powerhouse that has everything from hardware to software and application services, and can enjoy strategic benefits even amid U.S.-China technology hegemony.

He also said sovereign AI is catching up with U.S. and Chinese frontier models in performance. Upstage said the preview version of its open-source model, Solar Open2, under its "independent AI foundation model" project, scored 44.4 points on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index (AAII) 4.0. Upstage said this is at the level of Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 4.6 and OpenAI’s GPT-5.

It said its agent capability, measured by Tau2Bench, reached 98 percent, surpassing DeepSeek’s V4 Pro at 96.2 percent and comparable to Anthropic’s Fable5 at 98.5 percent. Upstage said Artificial Analysis independently measured those figures.

Kim also detailed the performance leap in Solar Open2. He said the first model could be used for media proofreading, Q&A and search, but could not call tools in agent use. He said the model to be released in June can be sufficiently used for agents. He also set a goal of making the best open-source model by year-end.

It said it is also proving performance by expanding its customers. It said more than 200 companies worldwide, including in South Korea and in the United States and Japan, are adopting Upstage AI. It also said new contract value in the first half of 2026 has already exceeded its full-year results from the previous year. Upstage raised about 730 billion won in cumulative investment and became the first domestic AI software company to reach unicorn status.

Upstage launches Upstage Company, aims for AI "for everyone"

It also unveiled a full-stack AI blueprint linking models, agents and a portal. It said the key is vertically integrating by bringing AXZ, the operator of the Daum portal, and Timely, a general-purpose agent platform, under Upstage Company.

In the agent segment, it introduced Upstage Studio, a procedural agent that automates work by combining task steps in blocks. Timely is a cloud-based software-as-a-service agent platform that can be used immediately without PC installation. It is currently used by about 600 public and education institutions, including Seoul City Hall, Korail, the Korea National Oil Corp and the Gyeonggi Provincial Library. It also secured cases of supplying universities such as Chonnam National University and Keimyung University for all enrolled students.

The Daum segment will shift to hybrid search based on AI agents. AXZ CEO Kun-soo Lee (이건수) said it will evolve from the existing method of listing links through keyword search to one in which an AI agent understands context and finds answers. The search AI answer summary service, AI Overview, is currently applied in part, and it aims to expand its release in July and apply it to all services within the year.

It also plans to strengthen vertical search in shopping, restaurants, travel, real estate and credit cards. It will provide search based on actual databases through partnerships with specialized companies in each field. Lee said generative AI has severe hallucinations in vertical search, and that user satisfaction will be higher if searches use real databases.

Kim said it will open an AI era for everyone that it dreams of.

Upstage begins IPO preparations, urges additional government support

Upstage is also preparing an initial public offering (IPO). Kim said an underwriter has been selected and it is preparing for investor relations, adding that specific schedules such as timing and market choice are being discussed internally. He said it has prepared in that direction since it first founded the company, aiming to share benefits with many people through a listing.

He also called for additional government support. Kim said it is focusing all company resources on improving model performance, and that it has repeatedly told the government and related officials that support needs to be more than 10 times the current level. He said government GPU support through the independent AI foundation model project was timely but insufficient at its current scale.