South Korean AI chip startup Rebellions has raised $250 million in a Series C funding round that saw participation from Arm and Samsung Ventures.

Existing investors Korea Development Bank and Korelya Capital also participated in the round. Rebellions has been valued at $1.4 billion following the raise.

The company said the funding would be used to accelerate the mass production of the company’s Rebel-Quad AI accelerator – a modular SoC (system-on-chip) built on a UCIe (Universal Chiplet Interconnect Express)-Advanced chiplet architecture.

Launched in May of this year, Rebellions said the chip was “purpose-built to meet the most demanding LLM workloads,” and features 144GB of HBM3E, offering both FP8 and FP16 compute performance.

“As AI inference workloads continue to rise, the demand for AI chips is expanding significantly. This investment marks an important milestone in Rebellions’ journey from Korea’s national AI chip champion into Asia-Pacific’s leading AI chip startup,” said Sungkyue Shin, CFO of Rebellions.

"We are deeply grateful to our investors for their trust and confidence in our vision and potential."

Founded in 2020, Rebellions specializes in AI inference accelerators that offer energy efficiency and low-latency performance.

The company began mass-producing its Atom and Atom Max NPU to run large language models (LLMs) in the data center in 2023. The chips have been deployed by customers in Japan, Saudi Arabia, and the US, the company said, adding that it is looking to expand its presence in the US, Europe, and Asia-Pacific to support sovereign AI infrastructure initiatives.

In June 2024, the company agreed to a merger with Sapeon Korea, a semiconductor company that was spun out of SK Telecom in 2016, and in July of the following year, partnered with Marvell to offer high-performance, energy-efficient AI systems that support AI deployments across APAC and the Middle East.