South Korean AI chip startup FuriosaAI has reached unicorn status with a valuation of $728 million, becoming the first unicorn company under President Lee Jae-myung’s administration.
The milestone comes just months after the company reportedly turned down an $874 million acquisition offer from U.S. tech giant Meta.
Several media outlets reported on July 24 that FuriosaAI recently closed a $123 million Series C bridge funding round.
The round attracted both existing and new investors, including Korea Development Bank, DSC Investment, IMM Investment, and newcomers such as Keyston Partners, Kakao Investment, IBK Bank, IBK Venture Investment, and IBK Securities.
The fundraising was significantly oversubscribed, reflecting heightened investor interest following news of the rejected Meta deal.
“The round expanded beyond initial plans due to strong demand from new investors,” said a venture capital executive. “Ever since Meta’s offer, attention around FuriosaAI has intensified.”
Founded in 2017 by Junho Baek-a former engineer at Samsung and AMD-FuriosaAI specializes in designing neural processing units (NPUs) for data centers.
The fabless company is focused on building high-performance chips optimized for inference tasks in large language models (LLMs) and other generative AI systems.
In March, FuriosaAI made headlines after walking away from Meta’s acquisition proposal. Instead of selling, the company opted to scale independently, driven by the growing success of its second-generation NPU, “Renegade,” which entered mass production last year.
Since then, FuriosaAI has been working closely with South Korean LLM developers such as Upstage and LG AI Research to fine-tune its hardware for next-gen AI applications.
The company’s rise aligns with the Lee administration’s strategic push to position artificial intelligence as a national priority, backed by expanded government support for the sector.
