AI startup Upstage expands into e-commerce with ConnectWave

Kim Sung-hoon, right, CEO of Upstage, poses with Lee Kun-soo, CEO of ConnectWave, after signing a partnership at the latter's office in Seoul, Friday. Courtesy of Upstage

By Baek Byung-yeul

Upstage, a local AI startup, partnered with ConnectWave, a domestic e-commerce data platform company, to build s generative AI service for the e-commerce businesses, the AI company that is internationally recognized for its large language model (LLM) technology said Monday.

The two companies signed a contract on Friday to build a private LLM so that users' of ConnectWave's e-commerce platforms such as Danawa and Enuri can use generative AI services.

Upstage is known for its generative AI capability as its AI model took first place on Hugging Face's Open LLM Leaderboard competition with a score of 72.3 last month.

Given private LLMs are specialized in preventing information leaks and hallucinations by learning only internal company data, Upstage said the models could become an optimal choice for service operators seeking to adopt generative AI services.

With the contract, the two companies plan to jointly develop and internalize a private LLM that enables various services based on Upstage's language model. For example, consumers visiting Danawa will be able to easily find the best products and receive recommendations through the private LLM.

Makeshop, ConnectWave's shopping mall creation solution, will also be upgraded by adopting the private LLM.

By training ConnectWave's private LLM with data from a specific shopping mall based on Makeshop, it will be possible to automate delivery tracking, inquiries, returns, review summarization and advertising copy development.

“We are pleased to reach this historic milestone of building the industry's first private LLM with domestic e-commerce powerhouse ConnectWave,” Kim Sung-hoon, CEO of Upstage, said. “To build a quality LLM, it requires quality data. With the best-performing Upstage's private LLM and high-quality local e-commerce data from Danawa and Enuri, we will provide our customers with the best domain-specific AI service capabilities.”

Lee Kun-soo, CEO of ConnectWave, also said their partnership will make an enormous impact on the local e-commerce industry.

“By building the industry's first private LLM with Upstage, ConnectWave marks another innovative milestone in the Korean e-commerce industry,” Lee said. "At a time when the industry is facing another massive transformation driven by private LLMs, ConnectWave will continue to position itself as the next-generation e-commerce platform leader among consumers, affiliates and partner companies.”