# Upstage bets on full home-grown AI stack as Korea pushes 'sovereign AI' > Source: > Published: 2026-06-16 08:59:14+00:00 South Korean firm Upstage said Tuesday it will pull its model, its workplace AI tools and a web portal into a single operation. The bet is that a home-grown AI system built end-to-end can compete without leaning on American or Chinese technology, a pitch the company is making as it prepares to go public. The ambition is not Upstage's alone. It is one of five firms the government picked last year to develop Korea's own AI models rather than rely on foreign ones, a push officials call "sovereign AI." Some of the money behind Upstage is public: of the roughly 730 billion won ($484 million) it says it has raised, part comes from a state-backed fund. The company calls itself Korea's first AI software unicorn and is now lining up brokerages, including UBS, for a listing the market values at 2 trillion to 5 trillion won. The reorganization is the platform that listing will be sold on. Under a banner it calls "Upstage Company," the firm is combining three things it now owns: Solar, its AI model; Timely, a startup it bought this month whose tools let office workers build their own AI helpers without coding; and Daum, an old web portal it agreed to buy from Kakao in May. His case for owning the whole chain was pointedly political. Kim pointed to Washington's recent move to cut off foreign access to some of the most advanced US-made AI models, which to him showed the danger of depending on others. "AI is no longer just a service or a tool. It has become a national strategic asset," he said, warning that whoever controls the core technology "can cut off supply whenever they choose." He urged the government to raise its support more than tenfold. Upstage's claims about the technology itself are bold but hard to check. It said a preview of its newest model, due late this month, performs on par with leading systems from the US makers Anthropic and OpenAI, and beats a comparable Chinese model on a test of AI "agents," tools that carry out tasks on their own. Those results come from the company and have not been independently confirmed. Daum is the real gamble. The faded portal, now handling barely 1 percent of the country's searches, is meant to put Solar in front of consumers and feed it Korean-language data. Upstage plans to start adding AI-written answer summaries and smarter shopping, dining and travel search in July. mjh@heraldcorp.com