AI chip startup Rebellions raises $400 million in pre-IPO round at $2.3 billion valuation

Fresh off a successful Series C funding round in November, South Korean fabless AI chip startup Rebellions has raised an additional $400 million.

The capital injection comes ahead of an IPO scheduled for later this year and was led by Mirae Asset Financial Group and Korea National Growth Fund. This also comes as the company is engaged in aggressive expansion efforts, with recently announced plans to increase its presence in Asia as well as the Middle East and the United States.

Founded in 2020, Rebellions develops and designs AI chips while outsourcing manufacturing. The startup’s chip is designed for inference, the computations required for AI models to respond to user queries. As LLM matures and sees widespread commercial deployment, inference becomes more important.

The company raised $124 million in Series B in 2024. Rebellions then raised another $250 million in Series C in November. As of today, the company has raised $850 million in total funding, of which $650 million has been raised in the past six months. Meanwhile, the company announced on Monday that the startup is valued at approximately $2.34 billion.

In addition to the funding round, Rebellions also announced the release of two new products called RebelRack and RebelPOD, an AI infrastructure platform. POD stands for production-ready inference compute unit, and Rack “consolidates multiple racks into a scalable cluster designed for large-scale AI deployments,” the company said.

In a conversation with TechCrunch, CEO Marshall Choi, who is leading the company’s global expansion efforts, said the company recently established legal entities in the United States, Japan, Saudi Arabia, and Taiwan. Choi said the company is building an ecosystem of technology partners in the U.S. and plans to do business with cloud providers, government agencies, carriers and neocloud. He declined to comment on the timing of the IPO.

“AI is now being measured in its ability to operate in the real world at scale, under power constraints, and with clear economic benefits,” said Sunghyun Park, co-founder and CEO of Rebellions. “This shifts the center of gravity to the inference infrastructure and the software that enables that infrastructure.”

Rebellions is one of a new generation of chip startups seeking to challenge Nvidia’s once ironclad grip on the chip industry. As that dominance begins to wane, other big tech companies like AWS, Meta, and Google are also working to produce their own chips, along with a new generation of startups.