Upstage Solar
South Korea's frontier LLM — compact, multilingual, KOSPI-bound
Overview
Upstage's Solar family runs from the open Solar 10.7B through frontier-class Solar Pro 3 (102B total/12B active, MoE), pairing efficient reasoning with Document AI; the Seoul startup is prepping Korea's first genAI IPO on KOSPI as early as H2 2026.
Pricing
Pricing shown for reference only. These figures reflect RECATOOLS research as of 11 Jul 2026 and may be out of date or incomplete. This is not financial or purchasing advice — always confirm the current price on the provider’s official website before making any decision.
- +10% bonus credits
- Community support
- +15% bonus credits
- Email support (3-day)
- +20% bonus credits
- Priority support (1-day)
- All models incl. Document AI
- Private/on-prem deployment
- Dedicated 24/7 support
Use cases
What you can produce with Upstage Solar
- A production-grade Korean/English/Japanese chatbot API integrated into your enterprise stack via OpenAI-compatible endpoint
- Automated document intelligence pipeline that parses, classifies, and extracts structured data from PDFs at $0.01–$0.03 per page
- Fine-tuned Solar model variant for a specific domain (finance, legal, healthcare) hosted on-premise for data-residency compliance
- Agentic workflow system using Solar Pro 3's tool-use and structured-output capabilities for multi-step business process automation
- Benchmark comparison report validating Solar Pro 2 performance vs GPT-4o and DeepSeek R1 on your organisation's specific task distribution
- Korean NLP evaluation suite benchmarked against Ko-MMLU, Hae-Rae, and Ko-Arena-Hard-Auto datasets
ASEAN Perspective
Upstage Solar in Southeast Asia
Upstage has made concrete early moves into Southeast Asia: it co-developed a Thai-language sovereign LLM with KT Corp for Thailand's Jasmine Group — the first Korean sovereign AI deployment overseas — and actively markets Solar as a privacy-first, on-premise-capable model for data-sensitive sectors such as government, finance, and healthcare that face data-localisation laws across ASEAN. Its San Jose and Hong Kong offices anchor an APAC go-to-market push, and it has stated intent to replicate the Thai sovereign model success in other SEA markets. However, as of mid-2026, native language support for Bahasa Melayu, Bahasa Indonesia, Tagalog, or Vietnamese has not been announced, which limits plug-and-play readiness for multilingual ASEAN deployments; enterprises in those markets would need to fine-tune or augment Solar with local-language data.
Solar Pro 2 did something unusual for a 31B model: it out-scored GPT-4.1 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, the first Korean-built LLM to hit frontier status by that measure. Solar Pro 3 (January 2026) doubles down with a 102B-total/12B-active MoE design, 128K context, and $0.15/$0.60 per million tokens — cheap enough that AWS Marketplace integration actually matters for procurement teams already there. The gaps: multilingual support tops out at Korean, English and Japanese, with no native ASEAN-language tuning outside the bespoke Jasmine Thailand project. The developer console is still catching up to OpenAI's or Anthropic's, and Upstage is pre-IPO — hiring KB Securities and Mirae Asset for a KOSPI listing targeted for late 2026 or early 2027, a real business, not vapor, but still unproven at scale. Teams doing Korean or Japanese enterprise work get a lot for the price; ASEAN-language products need extra localization work.
What people say
$0.15 per million input tokens, $0.60 output — that's Solar Pro 3's list price, and it's a big part of why Upstage keeps showing up in enterprise shortlists. The company's real claim to fame came earlier: Solar Pro 2, a 31-billion-parameter model, out-scored GPT-4.1 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index in mid-2025, an unusually large result for its size class. Pro 3 (January 2026) moves to a mixture-of-experts design — 102B total, 12B active — with 128K context and, per Upstage, roughly double the agentic task performance of its predecessor.
Developers on OpenRouter and AWS SageMaker praise the OpenAI-SDK-compatible API and note Korean-language quality that Western frontier labs don't match. The complaints cluster around two things: the developer console is still maturing next to OpenAI's or Anthropic's, and language coverage is Korean/English/Japanese-first — there's no native support yet for Bahasa, Thai, Vietnamese or Tagalog, aside from a one-off sovereign LLM project for Thailand's Jasmine Group.
Upstage is also, notably, headed toward Korea's first generative-AI IPO — KB Securities and Mirae Asset are running the process, targeting listing as early as the second half of 2026, backed by revenue that reportedly grew about 320% over three years. Commercial-tier pricing runs on monthly usage commitments (Explore at $100+, up to Scale at $5,000+) rather than flat SaaS plans, with a separate Enterprise track for custom deployment. For Korean and Japanese enterprise reasoning workloads, Solar remains one of the more credible non-US options; ASEAN buyers will do more localization legwork.
Summary of public user & expert reviews, compiled by RECATOOLS.
Notable facts
- Solar 10.7B briefly topped the HuggingFace Open LLM Leaderboard in both English and Korean in late 2023, putting Upstage on the global AI map.
- Solar Pro 2 outscored GPT-4.1 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index with less than half GPT-4.1's parameter count — a key proof point for efficient frontier scaling.
- Upstage is South Korea's first generative AI unicorn, reaching a KRW 1 trillion+ valuation in 2026 with investors including Hyundai Motor, KDB, Amazon, and AMD.
- The 'Depth Up-Scaling' (DUS) architecture behind the original Solar 10.7B — merging two Mistral 7B models via layer stacking rather than mixture-of-experts — was an Upstage-pioneered technique.
Frequently asked questions
About this listing
This entry was compiled from publicly available data including Upstage Solar's official website, press releases, documentation, and reputable third-party publications. RECATOOLS is not affiliated with Upstage Solar unless explicitly stated.
Third-party AI tools update their pricing, features, availability, and policies frequently. Information here may be outdated by the time you read this — we make reasonable efforts to keep listings current, but cannot guarantee absolute accuracy.
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