Fresh from securing a successful Series C round in November, South Korean fabless AI chip startup Rebellions has now raised another $400 million. This latest capital injection, which arrives ahead of a planned public listing later this year, was spearheaded by Mirae Asset Financial Group and the Korea National Growth Fund. It coincides with the company launching an aggressive expansion drive, having recently announced intentions to grow its footprint not just in Asia but also in the Middle East and the United States.

Established in 2020, Rebellions focuses on developing and designing AI chips while outsourcing their manufacturing. The startup's chips are engineered for inference—the computational process required for AI models to generate responses to user queries. The significance of inference has surged as large language models have matured and entered widespread commercial use.

The company previously closed a $124 million Series B in 2024. Following that, in November, it secured an additional $250 million in its Series C. With this new funding, Rebellions' total capital raised now reaches $850 million, with $650 million of that sum accumulated in just the past six months. The startup's current valuation is approximately $2.34 billion, as confirmed by the company on Monday.

Alongside the funding announcement, Rebellions introduced two new products: RebelRack and RebelPOD, described as AI infrastructure platforms. POD is a production-ready unit for inference computing, while Rack "integrates multiple racks into a scalable cluster designed for large-scale AI deployment," according to the company.

The expansion strategy targets the U.S., Japan, Saudi Arabia, and Taiwan. CEO Sunghyun Park noted the company is building out its ecosystem of technology partners in the U.S., where it aims to engage cloud providers, government agencies, telecom operators, and Neoclouds. He did not comment on the specific timing for the IPO.

"AI is now measured by its ability to operate in the real world at scale, under power constraints, and with clear economic return," said Park. "That shifts the center of gravity toward inference infrastructure and software that makes that infrastructure usable."

Rebellions is part of a new wave of chip startups aiming to challenge NVIDIA's historically firm dominance in the industry. As that dominance shows signs of softening, other major tech firms like AWS, Meta, and Google—alongside this new generation of startups—are also pursuing their own chip development efforts.