FuriosaAI Raises $620 Million at a $2.9 Billion Valuation, With Korea's State Growth Fund Supplying Almost Half

FuriosaAI's new round is as much industrial policy as venture capital. The Seoul-based inference-chip maker said on October 28 that it raised a $620 million Series D at a $2.9 billion post-money valuation, and Korea's National Growth Fund committed KRW 370 billion, about $280 million. By Times of AI's arithmetic, that is roughly 45% of the round.

Who invested#

Other backers include the Export-Import Bank of Korea, UAMCO, Hanwha Asset Management, NAVER Ventures, DSC Investment, KDB Capital, Korea Development Bank, Nextrans and Kakao Investment, the company says. International investors include Infinitum, Jericho Capital, QUDA Capital, Cisco Investments, NeoFort Holding and Worldline Capital; SiliconANGLE puts their combined share at about $110 million.

How the state money worked#

The government's commitment came first and set the pace. Korea's Financial Services Commission, which oversees the National Growth Fund, said in a September 28 statement that the fund's review committee had approved the direct investment in May, with KRW 370 billion from its Advanced Strategic Industries Fund toward a capital raise of about KRW 800 billion. The statement answered a Chosun Biz report that the state money had sat unpaid for four months while FuriosaAI looked for private matching funds.

The commission rejected the idea that it had broken a rule by approving before private money was in place. It said no such rule exists, that the fund pays in once a company reaches its own fundraising target, and that it approves early on purpose, to act as "seed money" that draws in private capital. It also said the fund does not act as lead investor or set the company's valuation, which is left to the market.

Yonhap reported that FuriosaAI began the Series D in January aiming for KRW 450 billion to 750 billion, and closed at KRW 820 billion. Existing shareholders put in KRW 170 billion of that, according to Yonhap, and the Export-Import Bank of Korea chose FuriosaAI as its first direct venture investment. The state anchored the round, then waited for private and foreign money to fill it, and the round ended above its original target.

What it is selling#

FuriosaAI's RNGD inference card has been in mass production since January 2026. The company says it will produce 20,000 cards this year and has secured manufacturing capacity to more than double that in 2027. RNGD is a 180-watt PCIe card; FuriosaAI's NXT RNGD Server packs eight of them into a 4U, 3-kilowatt box with 4 petaflops of FP8 compute and 384GB of HBM3, according to the company.

FuriosaAI says RNGD matches the throughput of Nvidia's RTX PRO 6000 while serving twice as many users per kilowatt. Those are company figures; no independent benchmark was published with the round. Named customers include Samsung SDS, which offers an NPU-as-a-service built on RNGD, and LG Group companies running it in on-premises hybrid clouds, the company says. Its third-generation chip, in development with Broadcom and other partners, is planned as a 2-nanometre multi-die design with HBM4 or HBM4E memory.

"We are entering a new phase of bringing our technology to the global AI infrastructure market at scale," co-founder and chief executive June Paik said, according to SiliconANGLE. The company's case rests on power: it argues that data centres will be limited by the cost and availability of electricity, so tokens per watt matter most. Hyperscalers are making the same argument for their own silicon, as in Microsoft's Maia 300 plans. FuriosaAI's pitch is that customers who cannot build their own chip can still buy efficiency outside Nvidia.

Limits#

• Throughput and users-per-kilowatt comparisons are FuriosaAI's own; no third-party benchmark accompanied the announcement.
• The 45% state share is Times of AI's calculation from the company's KRW and dollar figures; exchange rates move.
• The won figures from Yonhap and the commission are in Korean won; dollar conversions in the company's announcement may not match them exactly.
• The 2027 capacity figure describes secured supply, not orders.
• The third-generation chip has no published ship date.

Sources#

• Financial Services Commission (Korea): Explanatory statement on National Growth Fund investment in FuriosaAI (September 28, 2026)
• Yonhap News Agency: FuriosaAI completes KRW 820 billion Series D (October 29, 2026)
• FuriosaAI: FuriosaAI raises $620 million Series D (October 28, 2026)
• SiliconANGLE: Energy-efficient inference chip developer FuriosaAI raises $620M to solve the data center power bottleneck (October 28, 2026)