South Korea's largest funding round to date for a domestic AI chip startup has been raised. FuriosaAI said on Wednesday it completed an 820 billion won Series D funding round. The company's valuation was assessed at about 3.8 trillion won. It began in January with a target of 450 billion to 750 billion won, but increased the size due to strong investor demand, the company said.

The largest investor was the National Growth Fund, which invested 370 billion won. Among overseas investors, U.S.-based Infinitum invested the largest amount. Infinitum co-led a $650 million investment round in AI semiconductor company Groq in June. Other participants included Singapore's QUDA Capital Partners, Cisco Investments, Abu Dhabi-based NeoFort Holding, and U.S. firms Jericho Capital and Worldline Capital.

Follow-on investments by existing shareholders totalled 170 billion won. The Korea Development Bank added 30 billion won, and seed investors including Naver, DSC Investment and KDB Capital also all participated again. NEXTRANS invested 48 billion won, the largest follow-on investment, while Kakao Investment, Quantum Ventures, Korea Investment Partners and Intellectual Discovery were also named. As a new investor, the Export-Import Bank of Korea made a direct investment in a venture company for the first time since its establishment. UAMCO invested 40 billion won, the largest amount among new domestic investors, and Hanwha Asset Management also joined.

FuriosaAI began mass production of its second-generation AI chip, RNGD (Renegade), in January. It is working with LG AI Research on technology verification and cooperation on commercialisation, and Samsung SDS launched an RNGD-based NPUaaS. RNGD will also be supplied to Upstage's next search summarisation service. The funds will be used to expand RNGD production and supply capacity, increase global customers and strengthen its software ecosystem. A third-generation AI accelerator being developed with Broadcom will speed up development to target the hyperscale AI infrastructure market.

FuriosaAI CEO June Paik (백준호) said, "We are now at a stage where we can begin to spread the technology we have developed in earnest to the global AI infrastructure market." He added, "We will accelerate global commercialisation of RNGD and the development of next-generation products, and present a new option in the AI infrastructure market based on high-performance, high-efficiency AI semiconductors."