Upstage has declared the launch of "Upstage Company," combining its AI agent platform "Timely" and "AXZ," the operator of portal Daum. The move marks the company's transformation from a developer of large language models (LLMs) into a comprehensive artificial intelligence (AI) company. The strategy aims to advance each unit's services in line with the AI agent era, providing AI for everyone from general users to enterprises.
Kim Sung-hoon, CEO of Upstage, held a press conference at the Conrad Hotel in Yeouido, Seoul, on Monday and said, "As the company shifts from one that only built models to a structure that spreads AI, it will grow significantly." He added, "We will open an era of AI for everyone, going beyond AI for enterprises." Upstage Company consists of Upstage, AXZ, whose acquisition was recently completed, and Timely. The business model seeks to create synergy by actively utilizing Upstage's LLM "Solar" in Daum's services and Timely's AI agents.
First, each company will advance its functions in line with the AI agent era. Upstage is focusing on improving the performance of Solar Open2, which it is developing as a proprietary foundation AI model. The preview version of Solar Open2 scored 44.4 points on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index (AAII), an AI performance evaluation body. Compared with OpenAI's GPT-5 (44.6 points) and Alibaba's Qwen 3.5 (45 points), Solar Open2's performance has improved.
Daum plans to evolve into an agent portal by combining AI with existing content such as search. "AI Overview" is scheduled to be introduced to Daum in July. The feature provides AI-summarized search results when users conduct searches, and has already been introduced and operated by Naver and Google. Lee Gun-soo, CEO of AXZ, who attended the conference, said, "We plan to introduce vertical search within the year by collaborating with partners that have specific databases in shopping, restaurants, and real estate." He explained, "Vertical search does not work well even for frontier AI models, so we believe Daum can respond." Timely will strengthen its business of developing AI agents needed for tasks such as image and video generation and document conversion, utilizing various AI models led by Solar.
Through these services, Upstage plans to maximize the token consumption processed by its AI models to boost profitability. Currently, about 200 companies worldwide, including in Korea, the United States, and Japan, use Upstage AI. In the first half of this year, Upstage's new contract value has already surpassed its full-year performance from the previous year.
Meanwhile, regarding the U.S. government's blocking of foreign access to Anthropic's "Fable 5," Kim said, "As AI has become a national strategic asset, a country that holds the technology can cut off supply at any time, so we must raise our own technology as much as possible." He argued, "The government and stakeholders must provide more than 10 times the current support."
