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

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

The latest funding infusion, which comes before a planned IPO later this year, was led by the Mirae Asset Financial Group and the Korea National Growth Fund. It also comes at the same time that the company is engaging in an aggressive expansion effort — with recently announced plans to grow its presence not only in Asia but also in the Middle East and the U.S.

Founded in 2020, Rebellions develops and designs AI chips while outsourcing their fabrication. The startup’s chips are designed for inference — the compute necessary for AI models to respond to user queries. Inference has grown in importance as LLMs have matured and begun to see widespread commercial deployment.

The company closed $124 million in a 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 last six months. Meanwhile, the startup’s valuation sits at approximately $2.34 billion, the company said Monday.

In addition to the funding round, Rebellions also announced the release of two new products: RebelRack and RebelPOD, which are described as AI infrastructure platforms. POD represents a production-ready unit of inference compute, while Rack “integrates multiple racks into a scalable cluster designed for large-scale AI deployment,” the company said.

In a conversation with TechCrunch, Rebellions’ Chief Business Officer Marshall Choy — who is leading the company’s global expansion efforts — said it had recently established entities in the U.S., Japan, Saudi Arabia, and Taiwan. Choy said the company was building out its ecosystem of technology partners in the U.S., where it plans to court cloud providers, government agencies, telecom operators, and Neoclouds. He declined to comment on IPO timing.

“AI is now measured by its ability to operate in the real world at scale, under power constraints, and with clear economic return,” said Sunghyun Park, co-founder and CEO of Rebellions. “That shifts the center of gravity toward inference infrastructure and 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 within the chip industry. As that dominance has begun to wane, other major tech companies like AWS, Meta and Google — along with the new generation of startups — have also sought to produce their own chips.