Newest: ‘Rebellions.ai’ by ex-SpaceX, Morgan Stanley, IBM Watson, Samsung set to disrupt the global AI chip space
KV’s latest deep tech portfolio unveils its $5M seed funding, quits stealth mode
In what could be construed as a landmark deep tech deal by KV in her recent years, the PhD-spangled team behind Rebellions.ai finally exited from stealth on November 24th by announcing the ₩5.5B Korean Won ($5M USD) seed round, led by KV and participated by SNU Holdings (by Seoul National University), GU Equity Partners, and other investors.
Related article by ZDNet Korea: https://zdnet.co.kr/view/?no=20201123170717
The idea behind Rebellions.ai was first conceived by two dear friends that kicked off their technical careers around the same time in 2014. Mr. Jinwook Oh, CTO, joined the much revered IBM TJ Watson Research in New York to work his way through various different hardware accelerator and deep learning projects until he got to lead special DL accelerator designed for large scale systems. On the other hand, Mr. Sunghyun Park, CEO, flew out to the east coast earlier than Oh to Boston for this doctoral degree at MIT; and unlike Oh’s knack for long-term occupation, Park blazed through various flagship companies such as Intel, Samsung Research, SpaceX, and Morgan Stanley, to learn, and more so, learn to build. After the stint at his first and last gig at the Big Apple, he teamed up with Oh and started testing their hypothesis of “blur the line between software and hardware, to push boundaries” — by infusing cutting-edge special-purpose chips with deep learning baked with actual, real-world data.
What makes Rebellions.ai a quintessential “KV family member” (a portfolio company) is the origination story itself. The 3rd co-founder and CPO of Rebellions, Hyo-Eun Kim, was still at Lunit as the founding member since 2014 and then-CPO when he personally made the introduction of Oh and Park to KV’s partner Ki-Jun in 2019. Lunit’s KOSDAQ IPO is well on its way for next year which will make itself the first deep tech portfolio of KV going public. As a very dear confidant to the two founders and also one of the biggest fans of KV, Kim was also there to be the bridge between the two and KV as the seed deal was closing out. And eventually Kim, feeling comfortable enough to leave the AI healthcare company already on autopilot, decided to follow his original passion of designing circuits and chips, where he saw immense potential and room to capture with this stellar technical team.
The AI chip market has already shown plenty of motion in the past few years — giants acquiring mammoths (Habana into Intel, Xilinx into AMD), unicorns lining up (Graphcore and Cambricon) as well as new entrants popping up, to cover datacenter needs or more specific focus areas. As a latecomer the latter is where Rebellions will focus on first, and eventually expand the portfolio into more general purpose AI chip down the road. By leveraging prior knowledge base and chip building experience from working on high-compute scenarios, the said A-Team will tape out Rebellious v1.0 the ASIC product based on cutting edge lithography and by skipping the FPGA verification step to expedite the go-to-market.
“We are a bit late into the game which we are well aware of,” stated Park in a cordial chat with Jay the communications head at KV. “This will not deter us from leveraging everything we know on how to design a working chip with minimal room for error, and prove to the world our team’s technological prowess. The (relatively mega sized for a Korean startup) seed capital we secured this year should help us cover the cost of R&D and fabrication cost; and we are looking forward to working with the best foundries coming out of Asia so we can compete in the global stage. We are more than ready.”
To see the rest of Kakao Ventures’ family companies, check out the official hompage: https://www.kakao.vc/familes
