RevolutionsSouth Korean fables The AI chip startup said today that it has closed $124 million (165 billion KRW) in a Series B funding round to develop its third AI chip called Rebel. The startup will also use the fresh capital, which was oversubscribed with an initial target of $90 million, to ramp up production of its data center-focused chip, Atom, and hiring.
This Series B values the three-year-old startup at about $658 million (KRW 880 billion), said Sungkyue Shin, Rebellion’s CFO, in an exclusive interview with TechCrunch. This latest capital infusion brings the total amount raised to around $210 million since the start of the rebellions in 2020.
KT, the South Korean telecom giant, led this latest round as a strategic investor. Previous backers of Temasek’s Pavilion Capital and Korea Development Bank, and new investors including Korelya Capital and DG Daiwa Ventures also participated.
The fundraising by Rebellions comes at an important moment in the chip industry, specifically regarding the development and use of AI chips.
Nvidia is the leader in the AI chipset market, and its name is synonymous with the AI boom currently sweeping the technology world. a lot Owns Notice How nvidia has I flourished Partially because trench Built around a hardware and software ecosystem. But it’s far from game over for the rest of the field. Data processing and related high costs remain major issues when it comes to AI applications, so the scramble continues to search for innovative breakthroughs to improve them.
Developments come from multiple fronts. Big tech giants like Google and Amazon, apple Microsoft develops or has its own chips to integrate AI into its products and services. Open AI CEO Sam Altman is said to be He visited South Korea last week To meet the country’s chip industry leaders, Samsung and SK Hynix. Moreover, unlock artificial intelligence It is said to raise billions of dollars To create chip manufacturing factories, to manufacture its own artificial intelligence chips. There are a number of startups outside of Rebellion that are bringing new concepts to the table to speed up processing while improving efficiency.
This fundraiser – that was Rumored for months – Comes on the heels of other startup moves. Last October, revolutions Announce It will develop its latest Rebel chip in partnership with Samsung Electronics, building on its relationship with them Fake at first About chips of its atoms. The two companies aim to complete development of the Rebel by the end of this year and begin mass production in 2025, Shen said, adding that the next-generation AI chip will target the generative AI market running large language models (LLMs) and high-speed measurement devices.
Rebel will use Samsung Electronics’ 4nm manufacturing process, and its AI chip will be deployed in Samsung’s advanced memory chip technology, Chen told TechCrunch. HBM3E, designed to handle high-bandwidth memory, and used to build and run large language models. Rebellions’ unique selling point is the claim that its technologies and products have greater versatility than custom AI chips, meaning they can support many generative AI models that need AI accelerators.
The company’s CFO stressed that Rebellions will cooperate with Samsung from joint development and chip design to mass production of Rebel. There’s a second motivation for Samsung’s work here: Aside from its chip efforts, South Korea’s largest memory chip maker is working on its own generative AI model, Samsung Gauss.
It also works with customers using its previous generations of chips. In May 2023, Rebellions’ strategic investor, KT, installed Atom, Rebellions’ data center targeting the AI chip, into its cloud-based Neural Processing Units (NPU) infrastructure. Rebellions says it expects to generate revenue from Atom in the second half of this year and will continue to produce that chip model via Samsung’s 5nm manufacturing process. Shih noted that Atom is designed for data centers and language models of up to 7 billion parameters, while Rebel targets larger language models.
Meanwhile, the startup’s first AI chip, Ion, which was launched in November 2021, is in the qualification testing phase in the US and has yet to sign on to any commercial customers. The Ion is designed for edge computing, and the company believes one of its main use cases will be in financial services applications, where large institutions that build their own hardware could use the chips to run stock forecasting and trading applications.
Rebellions CEO Sung-hyun Park, a former quantum developer at Morgan Stanley in New York, and four co-founders founded the AI chip startup in 2020.