Crit Ventures (CEO Song Jae-jun) announced that it invested 2 billion won in Furiosa AI (CEO Baek Jun-ho), an artificial intelligence (AI) semiconductor fabless company.
Crit Ventures is a venture capital (VC) founded in August 2020 by Song Jae-jun, former CEO of Com2uS and current Global Chief Investment Officer (GCIO) of Com2uS Group. It has invested in startups in various innovative technology fields, including artificial intelligence (AI), games, content, blockchain, IT platforms, and deep tech, from seed to Series C stages.
Currently, Crit Ventures has assets under management (AUM) of KRW 260 billion, including KRW 224 billion in Korea and KRW 36 billion in the global market. It is operating six funds with investments from foreign companies such as Supercell, Ubisoft, and NetEase, as well as policy funds such as the Korea Mother Fund, Growth Finance, and the Korea Development Bank.
In the AI field, we have invested in AI education company Day One Company, AI unmanned store solution company Finders AI, and AI-based pharmaceutical and bio research platform developer BioResearch AI. We have also invested in SuperVillain Labs, a new game studio that utilizes AI technology for content creation.
Furiosa AI, which Crit Ventures recently invested in, is a fabless semiconductor company that develops semiconductors specialized in AI inference operations for data center servers. It was founded in 2017 by CEO Baek Jun-ho, who holds a master's degree from Georgia Institute of Technology. Before founding the company, CEO Baek worked as a GPU/CPU development engineer at Samsung Electronics and AMD.
FuriosaAI unveiled its first AI semiconductor, 'Warboy', in 2021, and the chip demonstrated superior performance compared to comparable NVIDIA products. In August of last year, it unveiled its next-generation AI semiconductor, 'Renegade (RNGD)'. RNGD boasts 300% improved power efficiency compared to previous products, and is characterized by its excellent real-time inference performance as it can process large amounts of data in a short period of time. In particular, it is evaluated to have more than twice the processing performance per power compared to NVIDIA's high-end products.
“Through this investment, we plan to further strengthen our competitiveness in the AI semiconductor market and focus on securing global customers,” said Baek Jun-ho, CEO of Furiosa AI.
Song Jae-jun, CEO of Crit Ventures, said, “As generative AI spreads, demand for AI semiconductors is expected to continue to increase,” and “Furiosa AI has capabilities comparable to those of global top players in terms of technological prowess, efficiency, and price competitiveness, so we expect it to successfully make a leap forward in the global market as well.”
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