Rebellions cofounder and CEO Sunghyun Park.
Jae-hyun Kim for Forbes Asia
Kindred Ventures and Top Tier Capital Partners joined a $260 million funding round for Rebellions, an AI chip unicorn from South Korea.
The round is an extension of Rebellions’ Series C in September, which valued the startup at $1.4 billion. Earlier Series C investors included SoftBank’s Arm Holdings (its 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.
San Francisco-based Kindred is best known for its investments in Uber, Coinbase and AI search startup Perplexity. The firm was founded in 2018 by Steve Jang, who was born in South Korea and made last year’s Midas List. Top Tier, also based in San Francisco, is a fund of funds that also invests in startups. “Their participation marks Rebellions’ first investment from Silicon Valley venture capital firms, further strengthening our global expansion and presence in the U.S. market,” the startup said in a statement on Monday.
Founded in 2020, Rebellions introduced its latest AI chip offering, called the 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, making 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.
Last month, Rebellions announced it joined the Arm Total Design ecosystem, an industry-wide initiative led by Arm that streamlines custom chip development based on its data center-focused Neoverse cores. “By combining Arm’s proven Neoverse CSS with our Rebel series and upcoming products, we aim to deliver accelerators purpose-built for large-scale data centers,” Sunghyun Park, cofounder and CEO of Rebellions, said in an announcement.
And in July, the startup 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.
Park 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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