Upstage is leaping forward to become an “AI Company for All,” connecting artificial intelligence (AI) models, agents, and search into one.
Kim Sung-hoon, CEO of Upstage, held a “Media Day” at Conrad Seoul in Yeouido on the 16th and declared the launch of 'Upstage Company,' saying, “We will connect powerful AI models, agents, and a platform that everyone uses into one.”
Centered on 'Solar,' an AI model developed independently by Upstage, the plan is to connect the cloud-based autonomous AI agent platform of Timely, which was recently acquired, and the portal 'Daum' of AXZ, acquired from Kakao, to expand Upstage's existing corporate-centric AI business into an 'AI for All' service.
The core is making AI agents into services. Considering the domestic and international market situation where the transition from existing dialogue-centric generative AI services to agentic AI technology-based services has begun, the company plans to simultaneously develop reliable procedural agents and autonomous agents that judge and execute by themselves.
Kim explained, “We will advance Solar not as a B2C (business-to-consumer) generative AI service, but as a specialized model for AI agents,” adding, “We plan to release our independent AI foundation model 'Solar Open 2' at the end of this month, and the commercial model 'Pro 4' at the end of July, respectively.”
In particular, it recently received 44.4 points for 'Solar Open 2 Preview' from AAII (Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index), a global AI performance evaluation agency, recording a performance level comparable to OpenAI's 'GPT-5' and Anthropic's 'Claude Sonnet 4.6.'
He expressed confidence that once the official version of Solar Open 2 is released, it will surpass 45 points and secure performance at the level of the latest global frontier-class models by the end of the year. In addition, as a result of the TAU2-benchmark that evaluates agent capabilities, it achieved 98%, proving its performance by surpassing DeepSeek's 'V4 Pro' (96.2%) and chasing Anthropic's state-of-the-art model 'Fable 5' (98.5%).
Daum foreshadowed a leap forward to an “Agent Portal” based on Upstage's AI model technology, its own data such as news and language accumulated over the past 36 years, and queries generated by more than 10 million users weekly.
Lee Kun-soo, CEO of AXZ, emphasized, “In that AI can provide the most accurate answers to informational questions, we will support AI Overview and AI Mode,” adding, “We will differentiate ourselves with a search that solves users' life problems.”
It aims for a form where a search agent finds the appropriate answer to a question and an action agent completes executions such as reservation, purchase, and payment. The company plans to strengthen its agent search competitiveness by collaborating with vertical leaders in fields such as shopping, travel, and restaurants.
In addition, Timely provides a platform service where all AI agents necessary for work, such as image/video generation based on various language models including Solar and document conversion, can be utilized in corporate tasks with a single click without separate coding.
Upstage plans to intensively inject 560 billion won in investment funds secured through the National Growth Fund and others into AI model development and securing advanced graphics processing units (GPUs).
Kim said, “Considering the trend of making AI a national strategic asset triggered by 'Mythos,' Upstage will realize AI for all not only in Korea but also overseas, such as in the Middle East and Europe.”
