Upstage Co. Ltd., an artificial intelligence startup that develops document processing large language models, today announced that it has raised $72 million in new funding to expand its capabilities.

The company’s Series B funding round almost triples what Upstage raised in 2021, bringing its total funding to $100 million. The round attracted investments from new investors that include Korea Development Bank, Shinhan Venture Investment Co., Hana Ventures, Mirae Asset Venture Investment and IBK Securities. Existing investors, including SBVA, formerly SoftBank Ventures Asia, Primer Sazze, Company K Partners and Premier Partners, also joined.

Upstage offers a document processing engine and a large language model, Solar, which can be tailored to specific needs in e-commerce, healthcare, finance and legal industries by enterprise customers. Combined, the two products allow customers to quickly scan physical and digital documents, and then ask questions about them using natural conversational language.

Under the hood, Upstage’s “Document AI” solution uses optical character recognition, or OCR, technology that can quickly digitize and understand typed and handwritten documents to extract information. The company says it has a 99% classification accuracy rate that can recognize not only text but also graphs and checkboxes, even when it is in different forms such as rotated, slanted or wrinkled.

That makes it suitable for boxes or reams of physical documents that have been sitting in warehouses and need to be ingested. It can also make short work of survey materials with “chicken scratches” from employees or customers at a conference, according to the company.

Sung Kim, co-founder and chief executive of Upstage, cited the company’s success in South Korea as a reason to believe that the fundraise comes at a good time to jumpstart a global expansion with a new office in San Jose, California. “This funding will help us build the world’s best generative AI model and deliver the ultimate ‘AGI for work’ solution to businesses worldwide,” Kim said.

Upstage’s Solar LLM is available for on-premises deployment as well as via application programming interface integrations through platforms such as Amazon SageMaker JumpStart. The company said it designed Solar to provide an accessible alternative to larger, more complex and resource-intensive models developed by tech giants.

The company said its solution has seen high demand in high-growth industries such as finance in healthcare. Current customers of Upstage include Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. and South Korean business conglomerate Hanwha Group.

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