Rebellions, the South Korean AI inference chip startup backed by Aramco's Wa'ed Ventures, has raised $400 million in a 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 follows a $250 million Series C in September 2025 and brings total funding to $850 million, with $650 million of that raised in the past six months alone. Rebellions has now established entities in the US, Japan, Saudi Arabia and Taiwan as part of an aggressive global expansion ahead of a planned IPO.
Wa'ed Ventures, the oil giant’s $500 million venture capital arm, invested $15 million in Rebellions in July 2024, making it the fund's first investment in a South Korean company. At the time, Rebellions signed a memorandum of understanding with Aramco to deploy its specialised AI inference chips in Aramco's data centres, and CEO Sunghyun Park described the partnership as a path to building "high-performance and energy-efficient AI data centres in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia."
The company subsequently established a Saudi subsidiary and has deployed chips to customers in the Kingdom, according to its press materials. Wa'ed Ventures, which has earmarked $100 million specifically for AI investments, has positioned the Rebellions relationship as part of a broader strategy to localise advanced semiconductor capabilities in Saudi Arabia in line with Vision 2030.
The Korea National Growth Fund chose Rebellions as the very first investment under South Korea's K-Nvidia initiative, a government programme to develop domestic AI chip champions capable of competing globally. The fund contributed approximately $166 million of the total round.
Founded in 2020, Rebellions designs fabless AI chips optimised for inference, the compute workload required for running AI models in production rather than training them. Its flagship Rebel100 NPU is designed to deliver high performance per watt, and the company simultaneously announced two new products with the funding round: RebelRack, a production-ready inference compute unit, and RebelPOD, which integrates multiple racks into scalable clusters for large-scale deployment.
Park told CNBC that the US is the primary target market, naming Meta and xAI as target customers rather than hyperscalers like Amazon and Microsoft. Active proof-of-concept trials are under way with US customers. Marshall Choy, who recently joined as chief business officer, is leading the expansion. "While some companies may have an Nvidia-first bias, very few have an Nvidia-only policy," Choy said. "There is growing recognition that the future of AI computing is going to be heterogeneous."
Park was particularly candid about the constraint of memory chip supply. Samsung and SK Hynix, both Rebellions investors, are the world's largest producers of the high-bandwidth memory chips essential for AI inference, which gives Rebellions a structural advantage in securing supply at a time when memory allocation has become a competitive bottleneck across the industry.
Rebellions competes with Nvidia and a growing cohort of inference-focused startups including Cerebras, Groq and domestic rival Furiosa AI. Its chips have been deployed by customers in Japan, Saudi Arabia and the US, and the company partnered with Marvell in mid-2025 to offer AI systems supporting deployments across Asia-Pacific and the Middle East. The company has grown to over 300 employees and reported roughly tenfold revenue growth between 2023 and 2025.
