Fabless startup Rebellions closes $124m Series B
South Korea's Rebellions has raised a significant new capital fund and will now start work on its third AI chip, Rebel.
Last week Rebellions, based in Seongnam, confirmed its USD 124 million Series B funding to bring its total to USD 210 million. The round, led by South Korean telecom operator KT, valued the firm at USD 658 million, and reflected the general market clamour around AI semiconductor design.
Rebellions is positioning itself as a scrappy and low-cost alternative to the giant incumbents of the AI chip space. Competitors include Nvidia, but also Google, Amazon, Apple, and Microsoft, which are developing their own proprietary AI chips to power their LLM and cloud services. Rebellions says its Rebel chip could cost half of Nvidia's USD 30,000 price tag. It is also developing a data centre-focused chip called Atom.
Rebellions is co-developing Rebel with Samsung and will use the latter firm's high bandwidth memory chips and its 4-nanometer chip manufacturing process. The two companies aim to complete the development of Rebel by the end of this year and start mass production in 2025.
In the meantime, Rebellions will continue to ship its existing product roster. The startup’s first AI chip, Ion, which was launched in November 2021, is undergoing qualification testing in the US. And in May 2023, KT installed the Atom chip in its cloud-based neural processing units (NPU) infrastructure.
