ai/” target=”_blank” rel=”noopener”>Rebellionsa south korean without fable The ai chip startup said today that it has closed $124 million (165 billion KRW) 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 approximately $658 million (880 billion KRW) post-money, Rebellions CFO Sungkyue Shin said in an exclusive interview with TechCrunch. This latest capital injection brings the total raised to around $210 million since Rebellions' inception in 2020.
KT, the South Korean telecommunications giant, led this latest round as a strategic investor. Previous backers Temasek's Pavilion Capital and the Korea Development Bank, and new investors including Korelya Capital and DG Daiwa Ventures, also participated.
Rebellions' fundraising comes at a key time in the chip industry, specifically around the development and use of ai chips.
Nvidia is the market leader in ai chips and its name is synonymous with the ai boom that is currently sweeping the tech world. Many have technology/nvidia-ai-chips-gpu.html” target=”_blank” rel=”noopener”>observed how does nvidia have it prosperous partly due to the ai-nvidia-is-rocketing.aspx” target=”_blank” rel=”noopener”>pit which it has created around a hardware and software ecosystem. But the game is far from over for the rest of the field. Data processing and the related high costs remain major issues when it comes to ai applications, so the struggle continues in the search for innovative advancements to improve them.
Advances come from multiple fronts. The great technological titans such as Google, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft develop or have their own chips to integrate ai into their products and services. Open ai CEO Sam Altman reportedly visited South Korea last week to meet with the country's chip industry leaders, Samsung and SK Hynix. Beyond that, open ai ai-chip-factories” target=”_blank” rel=”noopener”>It is said to be raising billions of dollars set up chip manufacturing factories and manufacture your own ai chips. And there are a number of startups beyond Rebellions bringing new concepts to speed processing while improving efficiency.
This fundraising, which has been ai-chip-startup-rebellions-is-in-talks-to-raise-100-million” target=”_blank” rel=”noopener”>rumored for months – comes on the heels of other moves at the startup. Last October, rebellions ai/rebellions-and-samsung-electronics-partner-to-target-the-emerging-generative-ai-market-with-next-generation-ai-chip-co-development/”>Announced which would develop its newest Rebel chip in partnership with Samsung Electronics, building on a relationship that ai/rebellions-product/atom-2/” target=”_blank” rel=”noopener”>initially forged around their 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 generative ai market that runs large language models ( LLM) and hyperscalers.
Shin told TechCrunch that Rebel will use Samsung Electronics' 4-nanometer manufacturing process and that its ai chip will be implemented on Samsung's advanced memory chip technology. tech-day-2023-unveiling-new-innovations-to-lead-the-hyperscale-ai-era#:~:text=The%20HBM3E%20boasts%20an%20impressive%20speed%20of,achieve%20transfer%20rates%20exceeding%20up%20to%20more” target=”_blank” rel=”noopener”>HBM3E, designed to handle high-bandwidth memory, used to build and operate large language models. Rebellions' unique selling point is the claim that its technology and products have more versatility than custom ai chips, meaning they can support various generative ai models that need ai accelerators.
The company's CFO highlighted that Rebellions will cooperate with Samsung from co-development and chip design to mass production of Rebel. There's a second motivation for Samsung's work here: In addition to its chip efforts, South Korea's largest memory chip maker has been working on its own generative ai model, Samsung Gauss.
It has also been working with customers using its previous generations of chips. In May 2023, Rebellions' strategic investor KT installed Atom, Rebellions' data center-targeted ai chip, into its cloud-based neural processing unit (NPU) infrastructure. Rebellions says it expects to generate revenue from Atom in the second half of this year and will continue to produce that 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 language models, Shih noted.
Meanwhile, the startup's first ai chip, Ion, which launched in November 2021, is undergoing qualification testing in the US and has not yet signed with any commercial customers. Ion is designed for edge computing and the company believes a key use case will be in financial services applications, where larger institutions that build their own hardware could use the chips to power stock trading and prediction applications.
Rebellions CEO Sunghyun Park, a former quantitative developer at Morgan Stanley in New York, and four co-founders created the ai chip startup in 2020.
