Saudi oil company Aramco’s venture unit has invested $15 million into South Korean fabless AI chip startup Rebellions.
Dubbed Wa’ed Ventures, the investment arm is a $500 million venture capital fund that provides capital, loan financing, and incubation to technology startups.
Founded in 2020, Rebellions specializes in AI inference accelerators that offer energy efficiency and low-latency performance. The company began mass-producing its Atom NPU to run large language models (LLM) in the data center in 2023.
In January 2024, Rebellions closed a $124 million Series B funding round, which was recently extended to include participation from Wa’ed Ventures. In June of that same year, the company agreed to a merger with Sapeon Korea, a semiconductor company that was spun out of SK Telecom in 2016.
Rebellions has also been working with Samsung Electronics to develop a proprietary chip for generative AI.
Writing on LinkedIn, Rebellions co-founder and CEO Sunghyun Park said: “Excited to announce that Team Rebellions is officially the first Korean startup to receive strategic funding from Aramco Wa'ed Ventures! We will work together to build high-performance and energy-efficient AI data centers in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia!”
State-owned Aramco is the world’s largest producer of oil and has rights to the world’s second-largest proven crude oil reserves. In 2017, a report by CDP and the Climate Accountability Institute found that Aramco was responsible for 4.5 percent of global industrial greenhouse gas emissions from 1988 to 2015, placing second to the country of China.
The company established Wa’ed Ventures in 2013 and the investment arm currently manages a portfolio of over 70 startups.
Earlier this year, Wa’ed Ventures led a $6.5 million pre-Series A funding round for California-based AI platform aiXplain.
