SK Networks Makes Additional 47 Billion Won Investment in AI Specialist Upstage

Continued Strategic Cooperation Beyond 2024

SK Networks, an AI-centered business holding company, will strengthen its strategic cooperation with AI specialist company Upstage by making an additional investment of 47 billion won.

On the 23rd, SK Networks announced that it had invested 47 billion won in Upstage. SK Networks participated as the lead investor in the Series B round raised by Upstage in 2024, and proceeded with this additional investment by deciding to exercise the call option agreement concluded at that time.

Among domestic AI startups, Upstage, which possesses truly unrivaled technological capabilities, achieved a performance comparable to global big tech companies when its proprietary language model Solar ranked first on the Open LLM Leaderboard of Hugging Face, the world's largest machine learning platform, at the end of 2023.

In August last year, Upstage was the only startup selected for the government-led Independent AI Foundation Model project, and it recently proved its advanced capabilities once again by being chosen, after an interim review, as one of the three elite teams that passed the first evaluation.

SK Networks plans to continue its strategic collaboration with Upstage and, as an AI-centered business holding company, to strengthen partnerships with various technology companies, thereby securing future growth engines and building innovative business models.

An SK Networks official said, "We feel proud that Upstage, in which we invested from the early stage, is firmly establishing itself as a representative AI company of Korea," adding, "We will continue our cooperation not only to support the continued growth of Upstage, but also to contribute to the development of the national economy by revitalizing the AI business ecosystem."