S. Korean AI Chip Company FuriosaAI Raises $125M

Seoul, South Korea - FuriosaAI announced on Thursday that it has raised $125 million in Series C bridge funding to increase production of artificial intelligence chips.

The company has raised $246 million since its founding in 2017 and is valued at $735 million.

 Investors in the latest round included Korea Development Bank, Industrial Bank of Korea, Keistone Partners, and Kakao Investment.

FuriosaAI makes AI accelerator chips for data centers and enterprise customers.

The company stated that its RNGD chip achieved 2.25 times better large language model inference performance per watt compared to graphics processing units. LG AI Research has adopted the chip.

The funds will be used for mass production of RNGD chips and development of next-generation processors, the company said.

FuriosaAI appointed two executives. Jeehoon Kang from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology joined as Chief Research Officer for Compiler and Software Architecture.

Youngjin Cho, a former corporate vice president at Samsung Electronics, was appointed vice president of hardware.

Chief Executive June Paik said current AI relies on a business model that faces challenges due to infrastructure costs and the limitations of GPUs.

Yoon D. Kang, chief executive of PI Partners, said FuriosaAI has developed architecture and software for AI compute solutions.

Kakao Investment Chief Executive Do-Young Kim said FuriosaAI's technology provides an alternative to GPUs for AI inference.

The company develops hardware and software for AI computing in data centers and enterprise environments.