The South Korean fabless AI chip company, backed by Samsung, SK Hynix, and Aramco, raises $650M in six months and targets Meta and xAI as US customers. Korea’s National Growth Fund chose Rebellions as its very first investment.
Rebellions, the South Korean AI inference chip company, has closed a $400 million pre-IPO funding round led by Mirae Asset Financial Group and the Korea National Growth Fund, valuing the company at approximately $2.34 billion.
The round brings total funding to $850 million and follows a $250 million Series C in September 2025, meaning Rebellions has raised $650 million in the past six months alone, more than 75% of its total capital.
The company simultaneously announced two new products: RebelRack™ and RebelPOD™, vertically integrated AI infrastructure platforms designed to take its chiplet-based Rebel100™ NPU from silicon into fully deployable data centre systems.
The Korea National Growth Fund, a government-backed public-private vehicle established to support strategic industries including AI and semiconductors, chose Rebellions as its very first investment under the K-Nvidia initiative, South Korea’s programme to develop domestic AI chip champions capable of competing globally.
The NGF contributed ₩250 billion (approximately $166 million) of the total round. Mirae Asset, which has backed Rebellions since its Series A, led the remainder alongside private investors.
Eung-Suk Kim, Vice Chairman and CEO of Mirae Asset Venture Investment, described the round as reflecting strong conviction in Rebellions’ potential “to demonstrate its capabilities and value on the global stage.”
Rebellions was founded in 2020 and designs fabless AI chips optimised specifically for inference, the compute workload of running AI models in production, rather than training them.
Its flagship chip, the Rebel100™, is built on chiplet architecture and uses UCIe interconnects and HBM3E memory. The company has merged with Sapeon (June 2024), built commercial deployments across enterprises and governments, and now has a full-stack software approach built on open standards: Kubernetes, vLLM, PyTorch, Triton, Hugging Face, and Red Hat OpenShift are all supported.
The two new products extend this vertical integration: RebelRack™ delivers a production-ready inference compute unit, while RebelPOD™ integrates multiple racks into a scalable cluster for large-scale AI deployment.
Sunghyun Park, Co-Founder and CEO, told CNBC that the US is now the primary target, with “big labs”, specifically naming Meta and xAI, as the preferred customers rather than hyperscalers like Amazon and Microsoft.
Active proof-of-concept trials are under way with US customers. He was candid about one constraint: memory chip supply. “Memory is not very easy to get. But our demand is so huge,” he said.
His argument for why Rebellions is better positioned than other inference chip startups: Samsung and SK Hynix are both investors, making supply relationships more structurally secure. Marshall Choy, who recently joined as Chief Business Officer, is leading the US expansion.
The company has a future IPO in view, though no timing has been specified.
Stephan is the sports journalist for the Maple Grove Report.
