Upstage and AWS Join Forces to Drive AI Innovation in APAC and the United States

Upstage today announced a strategic collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to drive co-sales and go-to-market efforts while advancing the development of its Solar language models to broaden access to high-performance, cost-effective generative AI technology across the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region and the United States. In addition, Amazon will make a minority investment in Upstage, a milestone that underscores Upstage’s technical leadership and growing influence in the region.

Under this collaboration, Upstage will work with AWS as its preferred cloud provider to build, train, and deploy its future foundation models. The company will leverage AWS’s world-leading machine learning infrastructure, including Amazon SageMaker, AWS Trainium and Inferentia chips, to scale its large language model (LLM), Solar, and a suite of AI-powered document processing solutions.

“Upstage and AWS have built a strong foundation through years of collaboration, and this agreement represents a new chapter in our shared vision to accelerate AI innovation globally,” said Sung Kim, CEO and co-founder of Upstage. “With AWS as our strategic partner, we’re poised to scale our impact and bring secure, intelligent, and high-performing AI solutions to more organizations in the public sector.”

Together, the companies aim to empower governments, public agencies, and regulated industries with best-in-class generative AI solutions, optimized for the performance, security, and the compliance needs of the public sector. As part of the agreement, Upstage and AWS will collaborate on go-to-market strategies and co-selling efforts across APAC and the US.

“AWS is excited to enable Upstage to unleash a new wave of innovation”, said Jon Jones, VP and Global Head of Startups and VentureCapital at AWS. “From our fully-managed AI services to purpose-built chips for training and inferencing of foundation models, Upstage is leveraging AWS to uplevel how public sector stakeholders apply AI to improve efficiency and productivity, while keeping everybody’s data safe and secure.”

This agreement builds on years of successful collaboration. Upstage has long utilized Amazon SageMaker to train its Solar models, significantly reducing training time through advanced data pre-processing and continued pre-training techniques. The company also implemented its proprietary Depth-Up Scaling (DUS) method using AWS infrastructure, enabling more efficient scaling and improved model performance.

Upstage’s flagship Solar family of models, including the 10.7B-parameter Solar Mini and 22B-parameter Solar Pro, are available in AmazonBedrock Marketplace, Amazon SageMaker JumpStart, and AWS Marketplace. These models are already being deployed by hundreds of organizations across finance, healthcare, legal, education and government sectors in Korea, other countries in the APAC and the US region, and beyond to accelerate AI-powered digital transformation.

"Upstage has established itself as a key AI innovator in the Asia-Pacific region. With this investment, we are excited to support Upstage's next phase of growth as they scale their Solar foundation models and document processing solutions,” said Abhijeet Muzumdar, Vice President, Corporate Development at Amazon. “Sung Kim and his team are delivering impressive AI technology that's already helping several organizations across multiple sectors, and we’re committed to fostering continued innovation in generative AI by supporting visionary companies like Upstage.”

Upstage recently launched Solar Pro 2, its 31B-parameter flagship language model designed for complex reasoning and agentic task execution. The model features a hybrid architecture with dual modes - Chat Mode for rapid responses and Reasoning Mode for structured multi-step logical thinking, enhancing performance in mathematics, coding, and logic-intensive workflows. Solar Pro 2 demonstrates strong Korean language understanding with cultural awareness for specialized fields like finance, law, and healthcare, while functioning as an agentic system capable of autonomously executing multi-step workflows through external tool integration.

Beyond its flagship language model, Upstage is providing its enterprise-grade document processing solution Document Intelligence on AWSMarketplace’s AI Agents & Tools category. This agentic AI tool is designed to instantly extract key information from documents with varying layouts suchas contracts, invoices, forms, and financial statements, and transform unstructured text data into structured formats like HTML and Markdown, making them readily usable for downstream AI applications.

In line with their shared commitment, Upstage and AWS also co-launched the AI Initiative in April, aimed at accelerating generative AI adoption across educational institutions and nonprofit organizations. As part of the program, Upstage offers free API access to its full suite of AI models, while AWS provides complimentary infrastructure support and tools such as AWS Skill Builder and PartyRock, an experimental generative AI sandbox powered by AmazonBedrock. Over 200 organizations including Seoul National University and KoreaAdvanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) have already joined the initiative.

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