FuriosaAI, a semiconductor company building a new foundation for AI compute, today announced it has completed a $125 million Series C bridge funding round. The investment continues a period of significant momentum for Furiosa as global demand for high-performance, efficient AI infrastructure soars.
The company recently secured a major design win with LG AI Research, which has adopted Furiosa’s RNGD (pronounced “Renegade”) AI accelerator after it achieved 2.25x better LLM inference performance per watt vs. GPUs. To steer its next phase of growth, the company has also strengthened its executive team with two industry leaders: Jeehoon Kang, a renowned expert in parallel systems from KAIST (Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology), has joined as Chief Research Officer to lead compiler and software architecture. Youngjin Cho, a silicon and SoC expert who was previously a Corporate Vice President at Samsung Electronics, has been appointed Vice President of Hardware to accelerate the company’s chip development. A former Visiting Scholar at Stanford, Dr. Cho holds a PhD from Seoul National University.
Despite unprecedented demand for AI compute, enterprises are hitting a wall trying to scale AI applications because of the unsustainable power consumption, operating costs, and infrastructure limitations of legacy GPU-based hardware. Furiosa was founded to solve this problem by reimagining the AI hardware and software stack from first principles.
“AI today is dependent on a broken business model, where the infrastructure costs and constraints of power-hungry GPUs are a critical, rapidly worsening roadblock. We’re committed to solving this so that AI is truly sustainable – not just environmentally but economically as well,” said Furiosa co-founder and CEO June Paik.
“This funding allows us to deliver a new foundation for AI that is both powerful and efficient. We are grateful for the confidence our investors have shown in FuriosaAI and our vision to make AI sustainable, and thus accessible for everyone,” Paik added. “With two world-class technical leaders – Professor Kang in compiler and software architecture and Dr. Cho in silicon hardware – joining Furiosa, we will scale RNGD production globally and accelerate the development of our next-generation chip.”
The funding round was supported by a number of new and existing investors, including the Korea Development Bank, Industrial Bank of Korea, Keistone Partners, and Kakao Investment.
“The world urgently needs new solutions to scale AI compute, and we believe Furiosa is one of the very few companies with the proven architecture innovation and software maturity to deliver,” said Yoon D. Kang, CEO of PI Partners. “With the success of Furiosa’s RNGD chip and the significant design win with LG AI Research, June and his leadership team have demonstrated their ability to deliver on their audacious vision for transforming AI computing. We are thrilled to deepen our partnership as they enter their next phase of growth.”
“FuriosaAI has built an exciting alternative to GPUs for AI inference,” said Kakao Investment CEO Do-Young Kim. “Their architecture delivers the performance and power efficiency that is critical for the next wave of AI applications. They have the right technology and the right team to transform AI hardware, and we are excited to help fuel their growth.”
The new funding will be used to accelerate mass production of RNGD to support global enterprise customers and lay the groundwork for development of Furiosa’s next-generation chip. Since the company’s founding in 2017, Furiosa has raised a total of $246 million from investors and is currently valued at $735 million.
