Sapeon completes $45 mn series A funding

Sapeon, a South Korean artificial intelligence (AI) semiconductor company, announced on Wednesday that it has concluded a Series A funding round, raising over 60 billion won ($45 million). The latest investment brings the company's valuation to over 500 billion won ($378 million).

Leading the Series A round was Ascent Equity Partners, with participation from a cohort of investors that includes GS Group affiliates, Daebo Communication & Systems Co., Hana Financial Group, Mirae Asset Venture Investment, We Ventures, E1, and others.

"This investment not only confirms the technical prowess of Sapeon but also underscores our ability to adapt our technology across a multitude of business applications," CEO of Sapeon Ryu Soojung said. "The funding will be instrumental in enabling close collaboration to offer high-quality AI services across various sectors."

Sapeon aims to be a comprehensive provider of full-stack AI solutions, ranging from AI semiconductor-based hardware to AI-driven software.

In particular, the company is set to cooperate with its investors in various domains such as financial optical character recognition(OCR) models, cloud-based AI services powered by Sapeon semiconductors, and innovations in smart transportation and factory automation.

Sapeon was initially established in the US as an AI semiconductor fabless, with joint investment from SK Telecom Co., SK Hynix Inc., and SK Square Co.

The company debuted its AI semiconductor X220 in 2020. A new iteration, the X330 is slated for launch in the latter half of this year and promises a performance boost of over four times compared to its predecessor, featuring an advanced inference neural processing unit (NPU).

Write to Seung-Woo Lee at leeswoo@hankyung.com