FuriosaAI closes $125M round to scale production of AI inference chip
The new funding will be used to accelerate mass production of Furiosa’s RNGD chip to support global enterprise customers and lay the groundwork for development of Furiosa’s next-generation chip.
South Korean AI chip startup FuriosaAI has announced it has completed a USD 125 million Series C bridge funding round. The investment continues a period of significant momentum for Furiosa as global demand for high-performance, efficient AI infrastructure soars.
The company recently secured a major design win with LG AI Research, which has adopted Furiosa’s RNGD AI accelerator after it achieved 2.25x better LLM inference performance per watt vs. GPUs, according to a media release.
To steer its next phase of growth, the South Korean company has also strengthened its executive team with Jeehoon Kang, an expert in parallel systems from KAIST (Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology), joining as Chief Research Officer to lead compiler and software architecture. Youngjin Cho, a silicon and SoC expert who was previously a Corporate Vice President at Samsung Electronics, has been appointed Vice President of Hardware to accelerate the company’s chip development.
“AI today is dependent on a broken business model, where the infrastructure costs and constraints of power-hungry GPUs are a critical, rapidly worsening roadblock,” said Furiosa co-founder and CEO June Paik. “We’re committed to solving this so that AI is truly sustainable – not just environmentally but economically as well.”
The funding round was supported by a number of new and existing investors, including the Korea Development Bank, Industrial Bank of Korea, Keistone Partners, and Kakao Investment.
“The world urgently needs new solutions to scale AI compute, and we believe Furiosa is one of the very few companies with the proven architecture innovation and software maturity to deliver,” said Yoon D. Kang, CEO of PI Partners. “With the success of Furiosa’s RNGD chip and the significant design win with LG AI Research, June and his leadership team have demonstrated their ability to deliver on their audacious vision for transforming AI computing.
The new funding will be used to accelerate mass production of RNGD to support global enterprise customers and lay the groundwork for development of Furiosa’s next-generation chip, the media release said.