AI chip company Tenstorrent has raised $100 million from investors including Hyundai Motor Group, Kia, and a Samsung investment fund.

The investment in the AI and RISC-V startup was structured as a debt that will convert to stock at a later date. Tenstorrent will not formally have a new valuation until it holds another round of equity fundraising, which the company said it plans to do next year.

Prior to the deal, Tenstorrent had already raised $234.5m to date with a valuation of $1 billion in its last round.

Tenstorrent builds scalable artificial intelligence accelerators for both the cloud and Edge, hoping to compete with Nvidia's GPUs, and is developing a RISC-V CPU. It also licenses its designs to other companies.

In this latest investment, the company raised $30m from South Korean automotive manufacturer Hyundai and $20m from Hyundai-subsidiary Kia. $50 million came from Samsung's Catalyst Fund and other investors including Fidelity Ventures, Eclipse Ventures, Epiq Capital, and Maverick Capital.

As part of the deal, Hyundai said that it would use Tenstorrent designs in "future Hyundai, Kia, and Genesis" vehicles, after the car company launched its own semiconductor development group last year. Earlier this year, Tenstorrent signed a deal with LG to put its chips in smart TVs.

"The trust in Tenstorrent shown by Hyundai Motor Group and Samsung Catalyst Fund leading our round is truly humbling," said Jim Keller, CEO of Tenstorrent.

"It has been impressive watching Hyundai Motor Group become the third largest automaker in the world through their aggressive adoption of technology including their acquisition of Boston Dynamics, their joint venture with Aptiv, and now their investment in us."

Prior to his Tenstorrent role, Keller was the lead chip architect at Intel. Before that, he spent five years at AMD where he led the company's Zen architecture.

Keller was also instrumental in designing Apple’s A4 and A5 processors, and Tesla's custom self-driving car silicon.