Upstage Signs Multi-Year Strategic Collaboration Agreement with AWS to Accelerate Generative AI Innovation

• Over 400 customers including Shinhan Securities, Law&Company, and Intel, leverage Upstage to build custom LLMs, chatbots, and knowledge bases
• Upstage leverages AWS's ISV Accelerate Program to expand its generative AI offerings globally

SAN JOSE, Calif., June 27, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- Upstage, a leading South Korean artificial intelligence (AI) independent software vendor (ISV) specializing in building generative AI enterprise solutions, today announced a multi-year Strategic Collaboration Agreement (SCA) with Amazon Web Services (AWS), an Amazon.com company, extending the companies' partnership to leverage the most secure and advanced cloud technologies and services to help customers unlock new generative AI capabilities. In addition, Upstage is now part of the AWS ISV Accelerate Program, enabling co-selling with AWS, which will expand the global reach of Upstage's flagship large language model (LLM) SOLAR globally.

In March 2024, Upstage launched its SOLAR MINI Small Language Model (SLM) on the world's leading cloud. SOLAR MINI is a versatile, more agile model that can be easily customized and fine-tuned to perform a wide range of language tasks in Korean, Japanese, and English (Thai will be available in 2024). These tasks include understanding, summarizing, translating, and predicting new content.

Upstage's SOLAR models make it easier for the company's customers to get started with generative AI without having to train their models from scratch, as well as launch new applications that are tailored to industry-specific use cases. Backed by AWS's robust security infrastructure, Upstage also ensures the utmost protection and confidentiality of user data.

AWS is supporting Upstage by providing guidance on best practices for applying generative AI responsibly and optimizing machine learning (ML) operations to reduce costs. Upstage is leveraging AWS AI services such as Amazon SageMaker, a service that enables developers to develop and deploy ML models, to fine-tune SOLAR for specific business needs and provide accurate, relative, and context-aware responses in applications.

The SOLAR models are available on Amazon SageMaker JumpStart, an ML hub offering foundation models, and on AWS Marketplace, AWS's curated digital catalog that makes it easy to deploy solutions from third-party software vendors. 

"We're thrilled to partner with Upstage in expanding generative AI globally," said Jeongwon Yoon, Director of Public Sector at AWS Korea. "Their innovative solutions on AWS will enable customers across industries to leverage AI applications and build new business models. This collaboration underscores our shared goal of accelerating AI adoption and democratizing advanced machine learning."

"This SCA highlights our strong partnership with AWS and our shared vision to help enterprises globally adopt cutting-edge generative AI," said Sung Kim, CEO and co-founder of Upstage. "With the world's leading cloud, Upstage is poised to expand internationally and deliver AI benefits to diverse clients worldwide."

Accelerating Generative AI Innovation Across All Industries

Today, more than 400 customers globally across industries including education, healthcare,  legal, finance, and telecommunications are working with Upstage to build custom LLMs, chatbots, and knowledge bases. Companies like Law&Company, Shinhan Securities, Intel, Metaverse Entertainment, Quora, ConnectWave, and Qanda are launching new applications tailored to industry-specific services, bringing generative AI capabilities to customers.

With Upstage, South Korea's leading finance company Shinhan Securities is developing a finance knowledge database system for document processing and information retrieval for its employees. This system aims to maximize productivity and accuracy in financial investment while ensuring data privacy and minimizing hallucinations.

This collaboration with AWS will provide innovative, secure, and high-performance generative AI services to law firms and legal institutions through Upstage. Law&Company, for example, is working with Upstage to develop 'SOLAR-Legal,' a language model tailored to provide legal support for public organizations and citizen services. "Through active technology cooperation with Upstage, we will enhance industry competitiveness and introduce innovative services that will change the domestic and international legal tech market," said Bonhwan Kim, CEO of Law&Company. 

Upstage has been part of the AWS ISV Accelerate Program since June 2024, enabling the partner to leverage AWS's extensive customer network and partners to market its generative AI solutions for enterprise applications worldwide, addressing the rising demand for LLMs and AI-powered business solutions.

From June 26 to 27, 2024, Upstage will participate in the AWS Summit Washington D.C., an event tailored for the public sector community interested in advancing their mission through technology. Upstage will be engaging with AWS executives as well as public sector industry leaders worldwide to accelerate their mission, deliver enhanced outcomes, and unlock new opportunities in the cloud.

About Upstage

Founded in October 2020, Upstage boosts work efficiency with industry-leading document processing engines and large-language models (LLMs). Our flagship product Solar LLM delivers GPT-4-level performance with an unparalleled speed and cost-efficiency. Available via on-premises as well as API integration through platforms like Amazon SageMaker JumpStart, Solar provides a versatile and accessible alternative to larger, more resource-intensive models developed by tech giants. Furthermore, our Document AI solution leverages AI-powered optical character recognition (OCR) technology to automate workflows and process unstructured data, reducing operational costs and streamlining operations for our clients.