South Korea’s Upstage has secured a US$45 million Series B bridge round supported by Korea Development Bank (KDB), Amazon and AMD, bringing the company’s total funding to US$157 million.

The new capital will be used to develop its next generation Solar language model, advance its document AI products, and support market expansion in Asia Pacific and the US.

The funding will also strengthen research and development to improve Solar’s capabilities and broaden enterprise applications, including document parsing, automated task execution and workflow management.

Upstage recently entered a strategic collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS), designating AWS as its preferred cloud provider.

The partnership involves building and deploying foundation models using AWS infrastructure, such as SageMaker and AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips.

Upstage is targeting inefficiencies in industries such as insurance, where claims adjudication costs in the US reached US$25.7 billion, with US$18 billion linked to overturned denials and unnecessary review cycles.

Many of these issues stem from manual processes and outdated systems.

Insurance is the company’s first global vertical, focusing on areas such as claims processing and broker submissions.

Central to this strategy is the Document Intelligence suite, which includes Document Parse, designed to transform unstructured documents into structured formats for large language models, and Information Extract, which identifies key data points from text.

The platform processes a wide range of documents with reported accuracy above 95%, reducing manual input, processing times and enabling more automated decisions.

Unlike conventional optical character recognition tools that only extract static fields, Upstage’s approach interprets documents in context, considering layout and meaning to deliver structured outputs suitable for operational use.

“This is a pivotal moment not just for Upstage, but for the future of generative AI in the enterprise,”

said Sung Kim, Co-Founder and Chief Executive of Upstage.

“The next phase of AI is about performance, precision, and readiness for real world complexity. That is exactly what we have built with our suite. Our collaboration with AWS brings scale, credibility, and deep technical alignment, all critical as we deliver production ready AI from day one in high stakes sectors like commercial and public sector insurance.”

Upstage’s Solar LLM, a family of proprietary small language models trained with Amazon SageMaker and available in the Amazon Bedrock Marketplace, underpins its wider generative AI platform.

The company also offers its Universal Information Extractor through the AWS AI Agents and Tools Marketplace.

Its models are already in use by Fortune 500 companies such as Samsung and are widely adopted by Korean insurance firms, as well as public sector and government institutions.

The new funding will also support recruitment in sales and marketing and international growth.

Upstage was recently named to the CB Insights AI 100 list, selected from thousands of global applicants.

The bridge round follows its US$72 million Series B announced in 2024, which was led by Korean investors including SK Networks and Shinhan Venture Investment.

Featured image credit: Upstage