Kim Sung-hoon, Co-Founder and CEO of Upstage, is one of South Korea’s most respected voices in enterprise AI. Before founding Upstage in October 2020, Kim spent years in both academia and industry — serving as a professor at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and later leading Naver’s Clova AI as its founding head. He is also widely known across Korea for his popular “Deep Learning for Everyone” online course, which helped introduce AI education to a broad audience.
Kim co-founded Upstage alongside Eunjeong Lucy Park (CSO), who led the Papago modeling team at Naver, and Lee Hal-seok (CTO), who headed Naver’s Clova Visual AI team. Together, the trio built Upstage around a clear insight: most companies, despite having vast amounts of data, struggle to actually apply AI to their business problems. Upstage set out to close that gap with foundational large language models designed for real enterprise productivity, including its flagship Solar LLM series and document AI tools.
Under Kim’s leadership, Upstage built a reputation for elite technical talent, becoming the first Korean company to win ten gold medals in Kaggle’s “AI Olympics” competitions within a year and a half of its founding. The company has since raised more than $157 million across multiple funding rounds, backed by investors including Amazon, AMD, KT, and the Korea Development Bank.
More recently, Upstage has positioned itself at the center of South Korea’s sovereign AI ambitions, deepening its partnership with AMD to deploy advanced GPU infrastructure and scale its Solar LLM models. Kim has described this work as building “Korea’s sovereign AI model,” aiming to make the country a genuinely competitive force in the global AI landscape.
