AI chip startup Rebellions raises $400 million at $2.3B valuation in pre-IPO round | TechCrunch
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The startup, which is planning to go public later this year, designs chips specifically for AI inference, another challenger to Nvidia's dominance.
Fresh off a successful Series C funding round in November, the South Korean fabless AI chip startup Rebellions has raised an additional $400 million. The latest funding infusion, which comes before a planned IPO later this year, was led by the Mirae Asset Financial Group and the Korea National Growth Fund. It also comes at the same time that the company is engaging in an aggressive expansion effort — with recently announced plans to grow its presence not only in Asia but also in the Middle East and the U.S. Founded in 2020, Rebellions develops and designs AI chips while outsourcing their fabrication. The startup’s chips are designed for inference — the compute necessary for AI models to respond to user queries. Inference has grown in importance as LLMs have matured and begun to see widespread commercial deployment. The company closed $124 million in a Series B in 2024. Then, in November, Rebellions raised an additional $250 million during its Series C. As of today, the company’s total fundraising haul now stands at $850 million — $650 million of which was raised in the last six months. Meanwhile, the startup’s valuation sits at approximately $2.34 billion, the company said Monday. In addition to the funding round, Rebellions also announced the release of two new products: RebelRack and RebelPOD, which are described as AI infrastructure platforms. POD represents a production-ready unit of inference compute, while Rack “integrates multiple racks into a scalable cluster desig...