FuriosaAI has closed a Series D round of KRW 820B, or about $620M, that values the Seoul inference chip developer at about $2.9B. That is close to four times the $735M valuation it carried after its previous round last year.
The company set out in January to raise between KRW 450B and KRW 750B. It finished above the top of that range, helped by the Export-Import Bank of Korea, which made its first direct investment in a venture company since it was founded.
South Korea’s National Growth Fund anchored the round. The government-backed vehicle put in KRW 370B, or about $280M, making it the single largest subscriber. Follow-on money from existing holders added KRW 170B, with Nextrans the biggest of those and additional cheques from the Korea Development Bank, Naver Ventures and Kakao Investment.
Overseas investors supplied $110M. Infinitum, a US firm, was the largest, alongside Jericho Capital, Cisco Investments, Abu Dhabi’s NeoFort Holding and Singapore’s QUDA Capital Partners. QUDA’s founder Charlie Foo is a former Nvidia executive who now advises the company.
The capital buys production rather than research. FuriosaAI’s second-generation RNGD card, pronounced renegade, entered mass production in January, and TSMC is building 20,000 of them this year. The company says it has lined up memory and factory capacity for more than 40,000 units in 2027, double this year’s volume.
Its pitch is power. Inference, the work of running a trained model, is now the dominant cost in data centres, and FuriosaAI argues its parts do that work on fewer watts than the incumbents. Whether customers switch depends less on benchmarks than on how quickly the supply chain delivers at that volume.
