Rebellions, a South Korean fabless AI chip startup, stated right this moment it has closed $124 million (165 billion KRW) in a Series B spherical of funding to develop its third AI chip, known as Rebel. The startup can even use the new capital, oversubscribed with an preliminary goal of $90 million, to ramp up manufacturing of its knowledge center-focused chip, Atom, and for hiring.
This Series B values the three-year-old startup at roughly $658 million (880 billion KRW) post-money, CFO of Rebellions Sungkyue Shin stated in an unique interview with Ztoog. This newest capital infusion brings the full raised to round $210 million since Rebellions’ inception in 2020.
KT, the South Korean telecom big, led this newest spherical as a strategic investor. Previous backers Temasek’s Pavilion Capital and Korea Development Bank, and new buyers together with Korelya Capital and DG Daiwa Ventures, additionally participated.
Rebellions’ fundraise comes at a key second within the chip business, particularly across the growth and use of AI chips.
Nvidia is the AI chip market chief, its identify synonymous with the AI increase that’s at present sweeping the expertise world. Many have noticed how Nvidia has thrived partly due to the moat created round an ecosystem of {hardware} and software program. But it’s removed from game-over for the remainder of the sector. Data processing and associated excessive prices proceed to be main points when it comes to AI functions, so the scramble continues within the seek for revolutionary breakthroughs to enhance these.
Developments are coming from a number of fronts. Big Tech titans resembling Google, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft develop or have their very own chips to combine AI into their services and products. Open AI chief government officer Sam Altman reportedly visited South Korea final week to meet the nation’s chip business leaders, Samsung and SK Hynix. Beyond that, Open AI is claimed to be elevating billions of {dollars} to arrange chip fabrication factories, to make its personal AI chips. And there are a selection of startups past Rebellions bringing new ideas to the desk to pace up processing whereas bettering effectivity.
Team up with Samsung
This fundraise — which has been rumored for months — comes on the heels of different strikes on the startup. Last October, Rebellions introduced that it could develop its latest Rebel chip in partnership with Samsung Electronics, constructing on a relationship it initially cast round its Atoms chips. The two firms goal to full the event of Rebel by the top of this 12 months and begin mass manufacturing in 2025, Shin stated, including that the next-generation AI chip will goal the generative AI market operating giant language fashions (LLMs) and hyperscalers.
Shin instructed Ztoog that Rebel will use Samsung Electronics’ 4-nanometer fabrication course of, and that its AI chip might be deployed in Samsung’s superior reminiscence chip expertise HBM3E, designed to deal with excessive bandwidth reminiscence, used for constructing and working giant language fashions. Rebellions’ distinctive promoting level is a declare that its expertise and merchandise have extra versatility than custom-made AI chips, which means they will assist varied generative AI fashions that want AI accelerators.
The firm CFO harassed that Rebellions will cooperate with Samsung from co-development and chip design to mass manufacturing of Rebel. There is a second motivation for Samsung’s work right here: Aside from its efforts in chips, South Korea’s largest reminiscence chip maker has been engaged on its personal generative AI mannequin, Samsung Gauss.
ATOM and ION
It’s additionally been working with clients utilizing its earlier generations of chips. In May 2023, Rebellions’ strategic investor, KT, put in Atom, Rebellions’ data-center focused AI chip, in its cloud-based neural processing models (NPU) infrastructure. Rebellions says it expects to generate revenues from Atom within the second half of this 12 months and can proceed to produce that chip mannequin by way of Samsung’s 5-nanometer fabrication course of. Atom is designed for knowledge facilities and language fashions of up to 7 billion parameters, whereas Rebel targets bigger giant language fashions, Shin famous.
Meanwhile, the startup’s first AI chip, Ion, which was launched in November 2021, is within the technique of qualification testing within the U.S. and has but to signal on any industrial clients. Ion is designed for edge computing and one key use case, the corporate believes, might be in monetary companies functions, the place bigger establishments constructing their very own {hardware} might use the chips to energy inventory prediction and buying and selling functions.
Rebellions CEO Sunghyun Park, a former quant developer at Morgan Stanley in New York, and 4 co-founders arrange the AI chip startup in 2020.