By Hamza Faisal
South Korean AI chipmaker FuriosaAI has closed a Series D funding round worth 820 billion won, or about $620 million, valuing the company at roughly 3.8 trillion won, the company announced on October 29. The round is the largest ever secured by a South Korean startup, and it gives FuriosaAI fresh capital to scale production of its second-generation AI chip and build its next one.
The company began raising the round in January with a target of 450 billion to 750 billion won. Strong interest from domestic and international investors pushed the final total above that range, the company said.
A state-backed bet on Korean silicon
The largest investor was South Korea's National Growth Fund, which committed 370 billion won. Existing shareholders added 170 billion won in follow-on funding, including all three of FuriosaAI's seed investors — Naver, DSC Investment and KDB Capital — while the Korea Development Bank also returned. The Export-Import Bank of Korea selected FuriosaAI as the first startup it has ever backed directly.
International investors contributed about $110 million of the round. The largest overseas backer was US firm Infinitum, which co-led Groq's $650 million round in June. Singapore-based QUDA Capital Partners, Cisco Investments, Abu Dhabi-based NeoFort Holding and US firms Jericho Capital and Worldline Capital also joined.
Built for inference, not training
FuriosaAI's pitch is focus. Its second-generation chip, Renegade (RNGD), is an inference accelerator — hardware designed to run AI models efficiently once they are trained, rather than to train them. The company says Renegade cuts the power and cost of running AI services, a selling point as data-center operators watch electricity bills climb.
Renegade entered mass production in January and is already being deployed commercially with partners including LG AI Research, Samsung SDS and Upstage. The new funding will expand RNGD production, strengthen the software ecosystem around it and accelerate development of a third-generation accelerator.
A challenger in Nvidia's shadow
The round lands as the AI chip market remains dominated by Nvidia, whose graphics processors power most AI training and much of inference. FuriosaAI is betting that a growing share of demand — running models cheaply at scale — rewards specialized, power-efficient hardware rather than general-purpose GPUs.
South Korea has been eager to build a domestic challenger. With state-backed funds leading the round and global investors joining, FuriosaAI now has both the capital and the credibility to test whether its inference-first approach can win deployments beyond its home market.
