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Upstage

Solar Pro.

South Korean enterprise model with depth-up-scaling architecture optimised for retrieval workloads.

Category
AI Models
Vendor
Upstage
Domain
upstage.ai
Pricing
Upstage Console API · Enterprise · On-prem licensing
Region
Seoul, South Korea
Models
Solar Pro, Solar Mini, Solar Embedding, Solar OCR

What it is.

Upstage's frontier model family. Founded by ex-NAVER Clova and Microsoft researchers including the founder. Solar Pro uses depth-up-scaling — Upstage's published technique for stacking and continuing pretraining of decoder layers — to reach frontier quality at a fraction of the training cost. Strong Korean coverage. Solar Embedding and Solar OCR extend the line into retrieval and document parsing.

Where it fits.

Korean and Japanese enterprises that need verifiable APAC data residency and Korean-native quality. Samsung, KB Financial, and SK Telecom run Solar inside internal RAG stacks. Strong fit for Korean-language insurance, banking, and legal document understanding. Solar OCR competes with AWS Textract inside Asian regional banks.

Use cases
  • Korean-language enterprise RAG
  • Document understanding for finance and insurance
  • Embedded enterprise search
  • APAC-sovereign on-prem deployment
Strengths
  • Strongest Korean-language enterprise performance
  • Depth-up-scaling reduces training cost dramatically
  • On-prem path available with full governance
Considerations
  • Behind frontier-closed on English long-tail knowledge
  • Smaller global brand awareness limits Western adoption

Frequently asked.

What is depth-up-scaling?

Upstage's published technique for building larger models by stacking and continuing pretraining of decoder layers from a smaller base. Documented in the Solar 10.7B technical report.

Who uses Solar in production?

Samsung, KB Financial, SK Telecom, and Hyundai are public references. Most deployments sit inside internal Korean-language RAG stacks with Solar Embedding and Solar OCR alongside Solar Pro.

Is Solar available outside Korea?

Yes. Upstage Console serves the API globally. The on-prem licence is available worldwide, with most non-Korean deployments inside Japanese and US enterprises.