South Korean AI software company Upstage raises $40 million for US growth

By Keira Wingate

Aug 20 - (The Insurer) - Upstage AI has raised a $40 million Series B bridge round to accelerate the rollout of its document automation tools for insurance companies, as the South Korean startup seeks to expand in the U.S. and other regulated markets.

The funding, backed by Korea Development Bank, Amazon and AMD, brings Upstage’s total capital raised to $157 million. The company said it will use the new funds to scale its Solar language models, expand sales in North America and Asia and grow its insurance-focused document intelligence suite.

“Insurance is an ideal first vertical for AI transformation using our core technologies,” Upstage's U.S. CEO Kasey Roh told The Insurer. “It’s document-heavy, high-volume and highly process-driven, with critical workflows like underwriting and claims hinging on the accurate interpretation of complex, unstructured documents.”

The company already works with most of the top 10 carriers in South Korea, powering production-scale use cases across underwriting and claims and currently processing more than 3 million pages per day.

“In the U.S., we’re seeing strong alignment with the same core challenges, particularly among large carriers and global brokers modernising legacy workflows,” Roh said. “We’re already engaged through early deployments and POCs (proofs of coverage), and the results are confirming what we’ve seen in Korea. The opportunity is massive.”

The company aims to ease the paperwork and manual reviews that slow down claims and other insurance processes.

Claims adjudication alone costs the U.S. insurance industry about $25.7 billion annually, with nearly $18 billion tied to overturned denials and unnecessary review cycles, according to industry estimates cited by the company.

“For claims teams, we extract and organise claim documents with line-level citations, enabling adjusters to triage and respond faster, support coverage reviews, assess damage with precision and move cases forward efficiently,” Roh said.

To help underwriters, “our platform instantly extracts and structures key information from hundreds of pages, allowing underwriters to assess risk, price accurately and issue quotes faster with greater confidence”, she added.

Upstage's document intelligence tools use AI to interpret complex, unstructured documents such as policies, loss runs, financial statements and broker submissions with more than 95% accuracy, according to the company.

Furthermore, Upstage’s platform is designed to understand layouts and context, producing structured outputs that can be directly integrated into underwriting and claims workflows.

Upstage has already won clients in South Korea’s insurance sector and is working with several Fortune 500 companies, including Samsung. The company said adoption is growing among U.S. carriers and brokers, which are under pressure to cut costs and speed up decision-making.

Upstage is also working with Amazon Web Services to train and distribute its Solar models.

“AWS is also leading core system modernisation for the largest insurance carriers in the U.S. and once those systems move to the cloud, the next question is: ‘What AI solutions can plug into them to drive real value?’ That’s where AWS sees the value in partnering with Upstage in delivering document intelligence and workflow automation,” Roh said.

Roh explained that trust is the biggest obstacle to AI adoption in insurance, not just in AI itself, but also in the accuracy and reliability of the data on which AI systems are built.

"Many insurers operate in high-stakes, regulated environments, where every decision must be traceable and defensible," she said. "That’s why we believe document processing is the foundational layer of any successful AI strategy. If you can’t trust the data extracted from your documents, it’s impossible to trust anything built on top of it."

Upstage is addressing this head-on by designing a platform for traceability, auditability and transparency from the ground up.

Founded in 2020, Upstage featured on the CB Insights AI 100 list in 2025. The company previously raised $72 million in a 2024 Series B round led by SK Networks and Shinhan Venture Investment.