Rebellions AI chip.
Provided by Rebellions
TThe stunning rise in Nvidia’s stock price last year is part of an arms race among semiconductor startups from Silicon Valley to Seoul to attract more funding and gain a foothold in the burgeoning AI chip market. spurred on. In South Korea’s semiconductor hub, a four-year-old AI chip startup led by a former Wall Street quant recently received a major boost in its funding race.
Last week, Rebellions, based in Seongnam, south of Seoul, announced it had raised $124 million in Series B funding, bringing its total funding to $210 million. According to Rebellions, this is more than any other Korean AI chip startup. “This is almost twice as much as other competitors,” his Sunghyun Park, co-founder and CEO of Rebellions, says excitedly in a video interview.
Competitors include Seoul-based private equity firm Ascent Equity Partners (backer of “Baby Shark” author Pinkfong), South Korean conglomerate GS Group, and WE Ventures, whose portfolio includes Korean companies. These include Sapeon, which raised $45 million from investors in July. Doonam, a cryptocurrency exchange operator run by wealthy lister Song Chi-hyun. Another competitor is FuriosaAI, which raised $70 million in Series B in 2021 from investors including D2 Startup Factory, backed by South Korean billionaire Lee Hye-jin’s internet giant Naver. DSC Investment is an early backer of MangoBoost, a chip design startup based in Seoul and Seattle. and Seoul-based Aion Asset Management.
Rebellions’ Series B round valued it at $650 million. “But the funding market is very bad right now and interest rates are rising,” added Park, who was a quantitative developer at Morgan Stanley in New York before launching Rebellions in 2020. It will definitely become a unicorn company. ”
Sunghyun Park, co-founder and CEO of Rebellions;
Provided by Rebellions
The round was led by South Korean carrier KT, with participation from KT Cloud, KT’s data center division, and Shinhan Venture Investment, a division of banking giant Shinhan Financial Group. Other investors in the round include Temasek’s Pavilion Capital and Correya Capital, founded and led by former French Digital Economy Minister Fleur Pellerin, who is of Korean descent. Japan’s DG Daiwa Ventures is a joint venture between securities firm Daiwa Securities Group and early investor Digital Garage. Noh & Partners is a Korean private equity firm whose portfolio companies include his Forbes Asia 100 to Watch 2022 honoree Soul Robotics.
Rebellions’ early investors include Kakao Ventures, the venture capital arm of billionaire Kim Bum-soo’s internet giant Kakao. National Industrial Bank of Korea. SV Investment is a South Korean venture capital firm that supports companies such as Kakao and Choonbo, an EV battery parts manufacturer led by South Korean billionaire Lee Sang-ryul. IMM Investment’s portfolio companies include billionaire Beom Kim’s Coupang and Jang Byung-gyu’s Krafton.
Investors like Rebellions because of its team, which combines U.S. R&D expertise with Korean manufacturing know-how, said Park, who holds a Ph.D. He earned his Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT and previously worked at his Texas office for SpaceX, Intel, and Samsung. “He is the only AI chip company with such talented people,” he says. “That’s why we got a lot of attention,” says Jinwook Oh, co-founder and CTO of Rebellions, for example, in New York, where he worked at IBM for six years and earned a Ph.D. I am getting it. He received his PhD in electrical engineering from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, South Korea’s leading science and technology university.
Park and his team will use the funding raised in the latest round to invest in the next generation of large-scale language models and hyperscalers running on major cloud computing service providers such as AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. The company plans to develop a next-generation AI chip. One advantage of the new chip, called Rebel, is that it’s much cheaper than Nvidia’s chips, which cost more than $30,000 each, Park said. “We’re targeting half of his Nvidia price,” he says. “NVIDIA’s profits are huge.” The $1.6 trillion market capitalization company reported gross margins of 74% for the quarter ended Oct. 29.
“When there’s a Goliath, there’s also a David. I think one of the David candidates in Korea is the Rebellions.”
The South Korean startup says it can cut costs by using domestic suppliers and manufacturers. “By leveraging the Korean semiconductor ecosystem, we can significantly reduce manufacturing costs,” Park said. “It doesn’t have to be a global supply chain that involves Taiwan and the United States. That takes a lot of time and money.” For example, his Santa Clara, Calif.-based Nvidia is a world leader in cutting-edge chips. I mainly use the manufacturer TSMC from Taiwan.
More specifically, Rebellions uses the Samsung ecosystem. Samsung, led by billionaire Jay Y. Lee, is the world’s largest memory chip maker and the only contract chip maker other than TSMC capable of producing today’s cutting-edge chips. Rebellions is co-developing Rebel with Samsung and will use the technology conglomerate’s high-bandwidth memory chips and its 4-nanometer chip manufacturing process. “Because we work closely with Samsung, we can significantly reduce manufacturing costs,” Park said. Rebellions and Samsung aim to complete Level development by the end of this year and begin mass production in 2025.
By partnering with South Korea’s largest company and having the backing of the country’s top investors, Rebellions can compete with Nvidia, led by billionaire Jensen Hwang, Park said. “Right now, Nvidia is the king. But they have about 90% market share, and nobody likes it because it’s super expensive,” Park says. “When there’s a Goliath, there’s also a David. I think one of the David candidates in Korea is the Rebellions.”
He added: “We are rebellious. That’s what our team name says.”
