AI chip startup Rebellions raised $400 million in a pre-IPO round at a $2.3 billion valuation.

After completing a successful Series C funding round last November, South Korean fabless AI chip startup Rebellions has raised an additional $400 million.

Ahead of the IPO scheduled for the end of this year, this capital injection was led by Mirae Asset Financial Group and Korea National Growth Fund. This also comes at a time when the company is pursuing aggressive expansion efforts. In addition to recently announced plans to expand its presence in Asia, the Middle East and the United States have also been announced.

Founded in 2020, Rebellions develops and designs AI chips while outsourcing manufacturing. The startup’s chip is designed for inference, the computing required for AI models to respond to user queries. As LLM matures and begins widespread commercial deployment, the importance of inference increases.

The company closed its $124 million Series B in 2024. Then in November, Rebellions raised an additional $250 million during its Series C. The company’s total fundraising now stands at $850 million, $650 million of which was raised in the past six months. Meanwhile, the startup is valued at about $2.34 billion, the company said Monday.

In addition to the funding round, Rebellions also announced the launch of two new products, RebelRack and RebelPOD, described as AI infrastructure platforms. POD represents a production-ready unit of inference compute, while Rack “consolidates multiple racks into a scalable cluster designed for large-scale AI deployments,” the company said.

Marshall Choy, Rebellions’ chief business officer, who is leading the company’s global expansion efforts, said in a conversation with TechCrunch that the company recently established entities in the United States, Japan, Saudi Arabia, and Taiwan. Choy said the company is building an ecosystem of technology partners, with plans to attract cloud providers, government agencies, telecom operators and neoclouds in the United States. He declined to comment on the timing of the IPO.

“AI is now measured by its ability to operate in the real world, at scale, under power constraints and with clear economic returns,” said Sunghyun Park, co-founder and CEO of Rebellions. “This shifts the center of gravity to the inference infrastructure and software that makes that infrastructure usable.”

Rebellions is one of a new generation of chip startups looking to challenge NVIDIA’s once ironclad dominance in the chip industry. As this dominance begins to wane, other major tech companies such as AWS, Meta, and Google, as well as a new generation of startups, are looking to produce their own chips.