FuriosaAI, the South Korean developer of AI inference chips, has raised $620 million in a Series D round that values the company at $2.9 billion, roughly four times its previous valuation of $735 million. South Korea's National Growth Fund led the round with $280 million, part of a government-backed plan to build up the country's domestic semiconductor industry.
New investors in the round include Cisco Investments, Abu Dhabi-based NeoFort Holdings, Singapore's QUDA Capital Partners, Jericho Capital, Worldline Capital and Infinitum Partners. Existing backers NAVER, Korea Development Bank, Kakao Investment, DSC Investment and Nextrans also participated, and the Export-Import Bank of Korea made its first direct investment in a startup.
The raise follows a production ramp. FuriosaAI, founded in 2017, began mass production of its RNGD inference chip in January 2026. TSMC is manufacturing 20,000 of the chips for the company this year, and FuriosaAI plans to produce more than 40,000 in 2027, with further scaling after that.
Key facts
- 01FuriosaAI raised $620 million in a Series D round at a $2.9 billion valuation, up from $735 million.
- 02South Korea's National Growth Fund led the round with $280 million.
- 03TSMC is producing 20,000 RNGD chips for FuriosaAI this year; the company plans more than 40,000 in 2027.
- 04LG Group runs its EXAONE models on FuriosaAI chips, and Upstage uses them for live search summaries.
- 05FuriosaAI is co-developing a third-generation accelerator with Broadcom.
FuriosaAI's pitch is power efficiency. Its second-generation Tensor Contraction Processor, introduced earlier this year, is built on the RNGD architecture, which works on a three-dimensional matrix where Nvidia's GPUs use a two-dimensional one. The company says its chips draw less than half the power of Nvidia's GPUs, and they work with PyTorch and vLLM.
The chips are already in commercial use. LG Group runs its EXAONE models on FuriosaAI hardware, and Upstage uses the chips to power live search summaries for millions of users. Samsung Electronics offers access to them through a neural processing unit-as-a-service product it launched this summer.
Part of the new capital goes to the next chip. FuriosaAI is co-developing a third-generation accelerator with Broadcom, and CEO June Paik described the round as the start of a push beyond Korea.
“We are entering a new phase of bringing our technology to the global AI infrastructure market at scale”— June Paik, Co-founder and CEO of FuriosaAI
One existing investor framed the round around commercial traction. Yong Jung Park, a partner at NAVER Ventures, said his firm looks for the moment when technology companies move from proving their technology to proving their business model.
“FuriosaAI is at that point now, with its chip in volume production and in deployment with customers.”— Yong Jung Park, Partner at NAVER Ventures
The final number came in well above earlier targets. In January, FuriosaAI was reported to be seeking $300 million to $500 million for its Series D ahead of a possible public listing as early as 2027. Its previous round, a $125 million Series C in July 2025, had brought total funding to $246 million.
With $280 million of the $620 million, the National Growth Fund is the single largest contributor to the round, with the rest split between new global investors and FuriosaAI's existing Korean backers.
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