Uprisingsa South Korean myth The artificial intelligence chip startup said today that it has closed $124 million (KRW 165 billion) in a Series B funding round to develop its third AI chip, called Rebel. The startup will also use the new capital, oversubscribed with an initial target of $90 million, to ramp up production of its data center-focused chip, Atom, and for hiring.
This Series B values the three-year-old startup at around $658 million (KRW 880 billion) post-money, Rebellions CFO Sungkyue Shin said in an exclusive interview with TechCrunch. This latest infusion of capital brings the total amount raised to approximately $210 million since Rebellions launched in 2020.
KT, the South Korean telecom giant, led this latest round as a strategic investor. Previous backers Temasek’s Pavilion Capital and Korea Development Bank also participated, as well as new investors such as Korelya Capital and DG Daiwa Ventures.
Rebellions fundraising comes at a pivotal time in the chip industry, especially around the development and use of AI chips.
Nvidia is the market leader in artificial intelligence chips, its name synonymous with the artificial intelligence boom currently sweeping the tech world. Many I have was observed how is nvidia doing thrived partly because of it moat built around a hardware and software ecosystem. But he is far from the game for the rest of the field. Data processing and the associated high costs are still major issues when it comes to AI applications, so the race is on to find innovative breakthroughs to improve them.
Developments come from multiple fronts. Big tech titans like Google, Amazon, apple and Microsoft are developing or have their own chips to integrate artificial intelligence into their products and services. According to reports, the CEO of Open AI, Sam Altman visited South Korea last week to meet the country’s chip industry leaders Samsung and SK Hynix. From there, Open AI it is said to raise billions of dollars to set up chip factories, to make its own artificial intelligence chips. And there are many startups beyond Rebellions that are bringing new ideas to the table to speed up processing while improving efficiency.
Partner with Samsung
This fundraiser — that happened has been rumored for months — comes after other moves at startup. Last October, Rebellions was announced that it will develop its new Rebel chip in partnership with Samsung Electronics, building on a relationship originally forged around its Atoms chips. The two companies aim to complete development of Rebel by the end of this year and begin mass production in 2025, Shin said, adding that the next-generation AI chip will target the large language model (LLM) AI production market. and overscaling.
Shin told TechCrunch that the Rebel will use Samsung Electronics’ 4-nanometer manufacturing process and that its AI chip will be developed on Samsung’s advanced memory chip technology HBM3E, designed to handle high-bandwidth memory, used to create and operate large language models. Rebellions unique selling point is the claim that its technology and products are more flexible than custom AI chips, meaning they can support various AI production models that require AI accelerators.
The company’s CFO emphasized that Rebellions will work with Samsung from co-development and chip design to mass production of the Rebel. There’s a second motivation for Samsung’s work here: In addition to its chip efforts, South Korea’s largest memory chipmaker is working on its own AI production model, the Samsung Gauss.
ATOM and ION
It also works with customers using previous generation chips. In May 2023, Rebellions strategic investor KT installed Atom, the targeted AI chip in Rebellions data center, cloud-based Neural Processing Units (NPU) infrastructure. Rebellions says it expects to monetize Atom in the second half of this year and will continue to produce this chip model using Samsung’s 5-nanometer manufacturing process. Atom is designed for data centers and language models of up to 7 billion parameters, while Rebel targets larger large language models, Shin noted.
Meanwhile, the startup’s first AI chip, the Ion, which was released in November 2021, is undergoing certification testing in the US and has yet to sign on commercial customers. Ion is designed for high-end computing, and a key use case, the company believes, will be in financial services applications, where larger institutions that build their own hardware could use the chips to power stock forecasting and trading applications.
Rebellions CEO Sunghyun Park, a former quant developer at Morgan Stanley in New York, and four co-founders created the AI chip startup in 2020.
