Temasek’s Pavilion Capital backs South Korean AI chip maker Rebellions with $50M investment

Global venture capital firms are investing in the next generation of chip companies. Almost every industry uses Semiconductors, including 5G networks, automation, the Internet of Things, financials, smart homes, smart cities, virtual reality and self-driving cars.

Rebellions was founded by a former quant developer at Morgan Stanley in New York with four other co- founders. The South Korea-based company that builds chips for artificial intelligence applications has raised $50 million from investors.

The round was led by its existing backers, as well as new ones.

Rebellions has raised about $80 million (100 billion KRW) at an estimated valuation of $283 million, thanks to the Series A, which was oversubscribed and wrapped up in less than three months.

The startup will use the capital to mass-manufacture its second prototype, called ATOM, which will be used in enterprise server applications. The funding will be used to double its headcount to 100 employees and to open an office in the U.S. by the end of this year, Park said.

Rebellions is in talks with potential customers to get its first artificial intelligence chip. The ION customers could include global investment banks and the second chip ATOM targets large companies in the cloud sector. The ION chips are going to be manufactured by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company.

The company claims that its first chip, ION, improves trading speeds and reduces latencies and is two times faster than Intel Habana Labs' chip. Rebellions' ION makes it possible for lead orders to be processed more quickly and profitably than traders with slower execution speeds. Large investment banks, hedge funds and institutional investors use high-frequency trading to transact large number of orders.

The chip is called ION.

Park had worked as an engineer at both Intel and SAMSUNG ELECTRONICS.

According to Alan Priestley, there are more than 50 artificial intelligence chip makers in the world. The acquisition of Habana Labs by Intel was worth about $2 billion in 2019. According to a report by Insight Partners, the market for artificial intelligence chips is expected to grow to over $82 billion by the end of the decade.

The amount of venture capital funding for global chip startups more than tripled in the last year.

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