FuriosaAI Series D raises $620 million to take on Nvidia
The South Korean inference chip startup raised $620 million at a $2.9 billion post-money valuation, with Korea's National Growth Fund as the largest backer and production set to more than double in 2027.
Investors are still paying up for alternatives to Nvidia. The FuriosaAI Series D, announced on Thursday, brought in $620 million at a post-money valuation of $2.9 billion, roughly four times the startup's previous value, according to Bloomberg.
What happened
In won terms the round totals 820 billion won at a post-money valuation of about 3.8 trillion won, MoneyToday reported, calling it the largest investment ever raised by a Korean startup. The company had set out in January to raise 450 billion to 750 billion won. Korea's National Growth Fund committed 370 billion won, about $280 million, the biggest single ticket.
New international investors include Cisco Investments, Infinitum, Jericho Capital, NeoFort Holding, QUDA Capital and Worldline Capital, the company said. Bloomberg put the international contribution at $110 million. The Export-Import Bank of Korea, UAMCO and Hanwha Asset Management joined from Korea, and seed backers Naver, DSC Investment and KDB Capital invested again.
Furiosa's second-generation chip, RNGD, entered mass production in January. The company says it will make 20,000 cards this year and has lined up enough memory and foundry capacity to more than double output in 2027. Each card draws 180 watts and is air-cooled, which Furiosa pitches as a fit for existing data center racks without new cooling.
Eight cards make up its NXT RNGD server, a 4U, 3-kilowatt box with 384 GB of HBM3 rated at 4 petaFLOPS in FP8. Furiosa claims RNGD matches the throughput of Nvidia's RTX PRO 6000 at the same card count while serving twice as many users per kilowatt; those are company figures, not independent benchmarks. Upstage uses the chip for search summaries on Daum, MoneyToday said. Investors in the round point to production deployments at Samsung SDS and LG Group as proof that RNGD has moved beyond pilots.
Why it matters
The FuriosaAI Series D is a bet on inference, running trained models in production, where Furiosa argues efficiency matters most because a model is trained once but used billions of times. It targets enterprise workloads rather than training, and customers include Samsung SDS, which launched an NPU-as-a-service product on RNGD, and LG group companies. A third-generation chip is being developed with Broadcom for hyperscale data centers, MoneyToday said.
It also adds to a wave of large private rounds for AI infrastructure, from the DeepSeek funding round to Nvidia's own support for its customers, described in our report on Nvidia AI backstops. State money is a growing part of that picture in Korea, where the government fund is the anchor investor.
What's next
Furiosa says the FuriosaAI Series D cash will fund wider RNGD deployment, its software stack and the next chip. The question is whether it can win customers outside Korea at volume. The details are in Furiosa's announcement.
This article is for information only and is not investment advice.