The post U. S. VCs Join $260 Millicom. 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.
