Rebellions, a South Korean semiconductor startup, raised $250 million at a valuation of $1.4 billion to help build its latest AI chip offering, called the Rebel-Quad.
Arm, the chip designer backed by Japanese billionaire Masayoshi Son’s SoftBank, invested in Rebellions for the first time. It’s also Arm’s first investment in an Asian startup.
Samsung Ventures, Pegatron VC, Korea Development Bank, Korelya Capital and Lion X Ventures, a Southeast Asian venture capital firm backed by Singapore’s OCBC Bank, also participated in the Series C fundraising round, Rebellions said in an announcement Tuesday.
“This investment will accelerate Rebel-Quad mass production and fuel the company’s expanded chiplet-based product roadmap designed to deliver energy-efficient yet powerful inference infrastructure for the world’s most demanding AI models,” Rebellions said in the statement.
Rebellions’ earlier investors include the venture arms of South Korean billionaire Kim Beom-su’s internet giant Kakao and Saudi Arabia’s state-owned oil giant Saudi Aramco.
Founded in 2020, Rebellions introduced Rebel-Quad in August. Designed for large-scale AI inference (running a large language model after it has been trained), Rebel-Quad is the world’s first AI accelerator to use UCIe-Advanced, according to the company, which makes it energy efficient and scalable.
Rebellions plans to grow its presence in the U.S., Europe and the Asia-Pacific region. Its earlier AI chips, the power-lean Atom series, are already used in data centers in South Korea, Japan, Saudi Arabia and the U.S.
In August, a consortium that included Rebellions, SK Telecom and game maker Krafton was among the five consortia selected by South Korea’s Ministry of Science and ICT to develop a proprietary AI foundation model.
Rebellions in July announced that it is collaborating with semiconductor giant Marvell to design energy-efficient chips customized for sovereign-backed AI initiatives across the Asia-Pacific and the Middle East.
Sunghyun Park, cofounder and CEO of Rebellions, told Forbes Asia earlier this year, “AI chip designers don’t want to partner with others to avoid profit sharing and keep margins high. But I love to share because the market is getting larger, larger and larger.”
In November, Rebellions announced that it partnered with Taiwanese electronics assembler Pegatron to develop AI servers powered by the Rebel chip. Its venture arm is Pegatron VC, the Series C investor.
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