💰 AI chip funding day: FuriosaAI $620M and Upwind $400M lead $1.3 billion
📅 29 October 2026 • TechStartups
South Korean AI chip startup FuriosaAI closed a $620 million Series D at a $2.9 billion valuation, roughly four times its previous mark. International investors contributed $110 million and Korea's National Growth Fund about $280 million, with backers including Infinitum Partners, Jericho Capital, Worldline Capital, QUDA Capital and NeoFort Holding. The company says its RNGD inference accelerator is in mass production, with 20,000 cards planned this year and capacity secured to more than double that in 2027. The money also funds a third generation chip built on a 2nm multi die design with HBM4 memory, in development with Broadcom and other partners. The round lifts a valuation that stood at roughly $735 million before it, and the returning backers include NAVER through NAVER Ventures, DSC Investment, KDB Capital, Korea Development Bank, Nextrans and Kakao Investment, alongside a first direct startup investment from the Export-Import Bank of Korea.
Cloud and AI security company Upwind Security raised $400 million in a Series C at a $3.8 billion valuation, led by Bessemer Venture Partners, about nine months after its $250 million Series B at a $1.5 billion valuation. Upwind said revenue quadrupled during 2026 and that the funding goes toward its cloud and AI security platform, including sensors for AI workloads and scanners for AI agents. The round came after the company turned down an acquisition offer from Datadog at a comparable valuation, choosing to stay independent. Founded in 2022, Upwind has raised more than $800 million in total and adds roughly $20 million to $30 million in annualized recurring revenue each quarter, projecting about $90 million by the end of the year, with customers including Siemens, Roku, Carvana, Nubank and ClickUp. Canapi Ventures joined as a new investor, and a person familiar with the matter said Datadog did not offer a premium above the $3.8 billion mark.
Counting the ten tracked rounds of the day, the total reached $1.3025 billion, and the two largest deals alone accounted for about 78 percent of that sum. Both rounds sit in the layers around AI models rather than in the models themselves, one backing inference silicon outside Nvidia's ecosystem and one securing the cloud and agent workloads that run on top of it.
IMPACT: Capital for AI is concentrating in the infrastructure layers around models, where inference hardware and runtime security both show fast revenue growth and rising valuations.
Continue the conversation: https://t.me/AIAutomationArchitecture · Bluesky
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