South Korea – AI chipmaker Rebellions raises $250m backed by Arm, Samsung

South Korea – AI chipmaker Rebellions raises $250m backed by Arm, Samsung

South Korean AI chipmaker Rebellions has raised $250m in a Series C round backed by Arm and Samsung Ventures, taking the 2020-found company to a $1.4bn valuation.

Securing Arm as a strategic partner marks a “significant milestone”, the company said today (30 September), which will allow it to innovate towards the next generation of AI data centre infrastructure.

Aside from Samsung Ventures, the South Korean electronics giant’s venture capital arm, the Series C was supported by Pegatron VC, Lion X Ventures, Korea Development Bank and Korelya Capital.

Rebellions is best known for chips that focus on AI inferencing, as opposed to training. As IBM puts it, AI inference is the ability of trained AI models to recognise patterns and draw conclusions from data it hasn’t seen before. Google calls it the “doing” part of AI.

Earlier this year, Rebellions launched the second-generation Rebel-Quad, an AI chip for large-scale AI data centres.

In an interview with CNBC a few months ago, Rebellions’ chief financial officer Sungkyue Shin said that the company’s “master plan” is to go public. The company is aiming for an initial public offering (IPO) after the funding round has closed, he said.

In its funding announcement today, the company said that the latest funds will go toward mass producing the Rebel-Quad chip.

The company also intends to expand its global presence in the US, Europe and the Asia-Pacific markets, and take part in sovereign AI infrastructure initiatives.

Rebellions’ first-generation chips, the Atom and Atom-Max, already have customers across Japan, Saudi Arabia and the US, and power South Korea’s largest commercial AI service.

In 2024, the start-up merged with SK Telecom’s AI chip start-up Sapeon. The idea was that they would together take on global AI giants such as Nvidia.

Rebellions co-founder and CEO Sunghyun Park told Forbes in an interview earlier this year.

Only a few AI chip players can survive. In this fast-changing market, we need to consolidate all of Korea’s top talent within a single company,

“As AI inference workloads continue to rise, the demand for AI chips is expanding significantly,” Shin commented on the latest raise.This investment marks an important milestone in Rebellions’ journey from Korea’s national AI chip champion into Asia-Pacific’s leading AI chip start-up.”

READ the latest news shaping the AI Chips market at AI Chips News

South Korea – AI chipmaker Rebellions raises $250m backed by Arm, Samsung, source