Naver Makes Follow-up Investment in AI Semiconductor Startup 'PuriOsaAI'
[Asia Economy Reporter Buaeri] Naver's startup nurturing organization D2SF announced on the 1st that it has made a follow-up investment in the AI semiconductor startup 'FuriosaAI.'
FuriosaAI's Series B funding amount this time is 80 billion KRW, the largest scale among domestic semiconductor startups.
This investment involved not only Naver D2SF but also existing investors such as DSC Investment, KDB Industrial Bank, Korea Omega Investment Finance, Quantum Ventures Korea, and new investors including Ion Asset Management and IMM Investment.
FuriosaAI is developing semiconductors that can maximize AI performance in data centers and enterprise servers. They are designing AI chips optimized for inferring results from trained models.
Naver D2SF was the first investor in FuriosaAI and has supported its growth since the preliminary startup team stage in 2017. Since Naver D2SF's seed investment, FuriosaAI has been discussing cooperation to operate large-scale AI models and apply them to services in various Naver technology fields such as autonomous driving, robotics, AI, cloud, and video.
Yang Sanghwan, leader of Naver D2SF, said, "Based on FuriosaAI's outstanding technology, we expect it to create various synergies with Naver in areas such as HyperCLOVA (Naver's independently developed large-scale AI), robotics, autonomous driving, video, and cloud," adding, "In the current situation where global tech companies are accelerating investments in large AI models, AI chips with large-scale computing power will become essential infrastructure."
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Baek Junho, CEO of FuriosaAI, said, "We plan to launch the most competitive AI chip in the global market by leveraging this investment," and added, "To successfully lead the development of the next-generation chip released in the second half of 2022, we will actively recruit global talent and further strengthen the team's technical capabilities."
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