South Korean chipmaker Rebellions closed its new round of funding to value its company at $1.4 billion after securing $250 million of fresh funds. The company will now intensify mass production of its new artificial intelligence chip, the Rebel-Quad.
The Series C fundraising round is a milestone moment for the fledging company, with a list of heavyweight backers including Arm, the chip design company backed by Japanese tycoon Masayoshi Son’s SoftBank. That’s Arm’s very first ever bet on an Asian startup and a very good indicator of Rebellions’ technology and potential markets.
Round participants included Samsung Ventures, Pegatron VC, the Korea Development Bank, Korelya Capital, and Lion X Ventures, a Southeast Asia-based venture fund backed by Singapore’s OCBC Bank. The roster of variegated investors spans across Europe to Asia, demonstrating the global thirst of artificial intelligence chip technologies.
Rebellions Secures Funding to Accelerate Mass Production of AI Chiplet ‘Rebel-Quad’
Rebellions will use the infusion of capital to accelerate mass production of the Rebel-Quad and its chiplet-based product line roadmap. The company emphasizes that its processors will yield energy-efficient and powerful inference infrastructure capable of supporting the world’s highest demanding models of artificial intelligence.
“The investment will accelerate Rebel-Quad mass production and drive the company’s new chiplet-based product roadmap that will deliver energy-efficient but mighty inference infrastructure to the globe’s most demanding artificial intelligence models,” the company announced Tuesday.
The business is not new to having significant backers. Prior investors include South Korean billionaire Kim Beom-su’s venture arm of internet giant Kakao and Saudi Arabian state-owned oil firm Saudi Aramco, demonstrating repeated interest across markets in tech and energy.
Rebellions was founded in 2020 and announced the Rebel-Quad this August. The chip is specifically designed to provide massive-scale inference of AI, that is, run large language models that have been trained. The distinction here is that its technology is UCIe-Advanced and therefore the first globally to implement this standard, the company clarifies.
The technology enables increased power efficiency and scaling, and both of these are among the crucial considerations with increasingly large and ever-more complicated models of AI.
The company already has a head start with its earlier Atom line of processors, which are power-efficient. The company now employs these processors to run data centers within South Korea, Japan, Saudi Arabia, and America.
Rebellions Bets on Strategic Partnerships to Conquer the AI Chip Market
Rebellions is actively building its presence beyond Asia. The company is eager to open the U.S., Europe, and other Asia-Pacific markets. A good amount of this expansion appears to be motivated by its partnering model.
Rebellions revealed that it will be co-designing energy-efficient customised chips with the world-leading semiconductor company Marvell to power sovereign-backed artificial intelligence projects within the Asia-Pacific and Middle East markets. The collaboration satisfies the rising need within domestically developed AI infrastructure globally by tech-savvy governments.
Pegatron and the company subsequently teamed up with each other in November to co-design Rebel-chip-based AI servers. Pegatron’s venture arm also took part in this recent funding round to solidify the strategic cooperation between the pair.
What sets Rebellions apart from many of its counterparts is that it will partner instead of go it alone. Rebellions co-founder and chief executive Sunghyun Park told Forbes Asia this spring that his playbook is not the standard Silicon Valley one.
“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,” Park explained.
This spirit of cooperation has already yielded results. A consortium of Rebellions, SK Telecom, and game maker Krafton was selected among five such consortia by South Korea’s Ministry of Science and ICT to design a proprietary AI foundation model of the country.
As the world’s industries get recreated through artificial intelligence, Rebellions is getting ready to be a part of that infrastructure supporting the transformation. Equipped with solid support, strategic partnerships, and emerging tech, the company appears set to stand its ground against increasingly crowded competition within the realm of AI chips.
