Upstage, an artificial intelligence (AI) solutions provider, has raised US$27 million in a Series A funding round led by SoftBank Ventures Asia and Company K Partners. Other investors include TBT Partners, Premier Partners, Stonebridge Ventures, and Primer Sazze Fund.

The startup plans to use the funds raised to recruit a large number of AI specialists and developers to accelerate the development of its offering.

Headquartered in Seoul, Upstage enables companies to easily adopt AI solutions that standardize and automate their key tasks. It has already shown the strong potential of its “AI Pack” – an integrated AI solution that provides companies with technologically superior, practical values when applying AI to their business operations.

Since Upstage was founded in October 2020, over 100 companies have made enquiries on how to apply AI to their businesses. Within just eight months of its establishment, Upstage recorded US$7.6 million in sales, helping numerous clients successfully adopt AI across myriad sectors such as finance, education, and distribution.

Earlier this year, Upstage also garnered global recognition for its AI technology by winning five gold medals in Kaggle, an AI competition in which six million machine-learning developers from all over the world took part.

“We plan to actively offer an ‘AI Pack’ that advances AI service models so that companies can focus on their core businesses,” Upstage chief executive officer Sung Kim says. “We are looking for global AI specialists and developers and will do our utmost with the recently raised funding to build the business environment under which each industry can advance through AI Pack-based technology innovation.”

In addition to its own growth, Upstage has been actively helping to grow the AI solutions ecosystem. This includes partnering with the NAVER Connect Foundation to run a program that trains AI developers to help expand the AI industry.

Upstage also helped to develop the Korean Language Understanding Evaluation (KLUE) – an open benchmark data set developed to evaluate the Korean language proficiency of AI – which is publicly accessible and free of charge, as the startup seeks to expedite the advancement of the natural language processing of the Korean language.

Outside of Korea, Upstage has established a branch in Hong Kong and is now actively recruiting global talents. By 2022, it plans to hire over 200 AI developers, software, and research engineers from around the world to assist with its system and solution development.

It also plans to strengthen its organizational structure for future competitiveness and use this framework to expand across global markets, including Japan, the Americas, and Southeast Asia.