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

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

The latest funding injection, which comes ahead of a planned IPO later this year, was led by Mirae Asset Financial Group and the Korea National Growth Fund. It also comes at the same time as the company is engaging in aggressive expansion efforts – with recently announced plans to grow its presence not only in Asia but also in the Middle East and the US.

Founded in 2020, Rebellions develops and designs AI chips and outsources their manufacturing. The startup’s chips are designed for inference, which is the computing needed for AI models to respond to user queries. The importance of heuristics has increased as the Master of Business Administration (LLM) has matured and begun to see widespread commercial diffusion.

The company closed a $124 million Series B in 2024. Then, in November, Rebellions raised an additional $250 million during its Series C. As of today, the company’s total fundraising haul now stands at $850 million — $650 million of which was raised in the past six months. Meanwhile, the startup is valued at about $2.34 billion, the company said Monday.

In addition to the funding round, Rebellions also announced the launch of two new products: RebelRack and RebelPOD, which are described as AI infrastructure platforms. The POD represents a production-ready unit for inferential computing, while the Rack “consolidates multiple racks into a scalable cluster designed to deploy AI at scale,” the company said.

In a conversation with TechCrunch, Rebellion’s chief business officer Marshall Choi — who is leading the company’s global expansion efforts — said it recently established entities in the US, Japan, Saudi Arabia and Taiwan. Choi said the company is building its ecosystem of technology partners in the US, where it plans to attract cloud service providers, government agencies, telecom operators and Neoclouds. He declined to comment on the timing of the IPO.

“AI is now measured by its ability to operate in the real world at scale, under power constraints, and with a clear economic return,” said Sung Hyun Park, co-founder and CEO of Rebellions. “This shifts the center of gravity toward the inference infrastructure and the software that makes that infrastructure usable.”

Rebellions is one of a new generation of chip startups that have sought to challenge NVIDIA’s once-iron-clad dominance in the chip industry. As this dominance began to wane, other major technology companies such as AWS, Meta, and Google – along with a new generation of startups – also sought to produce their own chips.