Kindred Ventures and Top Tier Capital Partners have joined a $260 million funding round for Rebellions, a South Korean AI chip unicorn. This round is an extension of Rebellions’ Series C funding from September, which valued the startup at $1.4 billion.
Earlier Series C investors include SoftBank’s Arm Holdings—marking 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 Ventures is best known for its investments in companies like Uber, Coinbase, and AI search startup Perplexity. Founded in 2018 by South Korea-born Steve Jang, Kindred made last year’s prestigious Midas List. Also based in San Francisco, Top Tier Capital Partners is a fund of funds that invests in startups across various sectors.
Rebellions expressed enthusiasm about the new investors: “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 recently introduced its latest AI chip offering, the Rebel-Quad, in August. Designed specifically for large-scale AI inference—running large language models after training—Rebel-Quad is the world’s first AI accelerator to utilize UCIe-Advanced technology. According to the company, this makes the chip both energy efficient and highly scalable.
Rebellions plans to expand its presence in the U.S., Europe, and the Asia-Pacific region. Its earlier AI chips, the power-efficient Atom series, are already in use in data centers across 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 to streamline custom chip development based on its data center-focused Neoverse cores. Sunghyun Park, cofounder and CEO of Rebellions, stated, “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.”
In July, Rebellions also revealed a collaboration with semiconductor giant Marvell to design energy-efficient chips customized for sovereign-backed AI initiatives in the Asia-Pacific and Middle East regions.
Earlier this year, Park told Forbes Asia, “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 a partnership with Taiwanese electronics assembler Pegatron to develop AI servers powered by the Rebel chip. Notably, Pegatron’s venture arm, Pegatron VC, is among the Series C investors.
With continued innovation and strategic partnerships, Rebellions is poised to strengthen its foothold in the global AI chip market.
https://bitcoinethereumnews.com/finance/u-s-vcs-join-260-million-round-for-korean-ai-chip-unicorn-rebellions/
