Analysis
FuriosaAI, the Seoul-based inference-chip startup, raised $620 million at a $2.9 billion valuation in a round led by South Korea's National Growth Fund, the company said, as it steps up its challenge to Nvidia's grip on AI data-center hardware.
What FuriosaAI does
Founded in 2017 under chief executive June Paik, FuriosaAI designs AI accelerators it calls NPUs. Its newest chip, the second generation built on the company's RNGD architecture, is what SiliconANGLE reports the new money will help scale into production, with a third-generation chip now being co-developed with Broadcom. The company says its chips use less than half the power of Nvidia's GPUs for the same inference workload -- the power bottleneck data centers are increasingly running into as AI compute demand outpaces the electrical grid. FuriosaAI's chips are compatible with PyTorch and vLLM, the software stacks most AI teams already use, which lowers the switching cost from Nvidia hardware.
The company isn't pre-revenue. LG Group uses FuriosaAI's chips to power its EXAONE language models. Upstage runs live search summaries for millions of users on the silicon. And Samsung SDS offers access to FuriosaAI's processors through its own neural-processing-unit-as-a-service product -- meaning FuriosaAI's chips are already embedded in other companies' commercial AI offerings, not just running internal workloads.
“Founded in 2017 under chief executive June Paik, FuriosaAI designs AI accelerators it calls NPUs.”
FuriosaAI funding history
FuriosaAI's valuation has moved fast, according to Verdict and the company's own announcement.
- Series C bridge, Jul 2025 -- $125 million raised, lifting the valuation to $735 million and total funding to $246 million.
- New round, Oct 2026 -- $620 million raised, lifting the valuation to $2.9 billion, roughly a 4x markup on the July 2025 mark just 15 months later.
The company's earliest capital dates to a 2017 pre-seed round; the amount was not disclosed.
Who invested in FuriosaAI
South Korea's National Growth Fund led the round -- a government-backed vehicle explicitly built to grow the country's domestic semiconductor industry, not a conventional VC.
- National Growth Fund (lead) -- $280 million of the $620 million total.
- New investors -- Cisco Investments, Abu Dhabi-based NeoFort Holdings, QUDA Capital Partners, Jericho Capital, and Worldline Capital, together $110 million.
- Existing backers -- Korea Development Bank, Kakao Investment, and NAVER, all now in multiple FuriosaAI rounds.
NAVER Ventures partner Yong Jung Park described the firm's approach as waiting "for the moment when technology companies go from proving their technology to proving their business model" -- a signal that NAVER sees FuriosaAI past its early-stage risk.
AI chip market and competitors
Nvidia is the explicit target: FuriosaAI's entire pitch is power efficiency against Nvidia's GPU-dominated data-center stack. It isn't the only well-funded challenger. Tenstorrent, another AI chip startup positioning against Nvidia, raised $1.5 billion in a Series E earlier in October at a $6.2 billion valuation -- nearly double FuriosaAI's new mark. Both companies are chasing the same thesis: that the AI buildout needs alternatives to Nvidia's GPUs, whether on cost, power draw, or supply-chain diversification grounds. South Korea in particular has made backing domestic chip challengers an explicit industrial-policy goal, visible in the National Growth Fund's outsized stake in this round.
What to watch next
FuriosaAI's near-term plan is to scale production to 20,000 chips this year and 40,000 in 2027, alongside shipping the Broadcom-codeveloped third-generation chip. That production ramp, not the valuation, is the real test of whether FuriosaAI can grow beyond LG, Upstage and Samsung SDS into customers outside Korea's tech conglomerates. The risk worth flagging: nearly half this round came from a sovereign fund with an explicit domestic-industry mandate, which is a different signal than independent investors underwriting the same bet -- a government check can reflect strategic priorities as much as commercial conviction. Whether FuriosaAI's claimed power advantage holds up against Nvidia's next-generation chips, due out before FuriosaAI's third generation ships, will determine if this valuation holds.