iHW, a fabless AI semiconductor company with a Korean subsidiary, has closed a Series A round of KRW 52 billion, bringing its cumulative funding to KRW 64 billion. The round reportedly values the company at over KRW 300 billion. Deal Structure and Investors A total of 13 investors participated in the round.
Kolon Investment led the round as lead investor, while existing backers Woori Venture Partners, Mirae Asset Venture Investment, DSC Investment, and HB Investment all returned with follow-on investments. The Korea Development Bank joined as a new investor, and LIG Defense & Aerospace participated through a consortium formed with IBK Capital. The round follows an earlier Pre-Series A round of KRW 12 billion in late 2024, which drew Woori Venture, Mirae Asset Venture, HB Investment, DSC, and Kolon Investment, and a KRW 3 billion seed round in 2022 backed solely by BA Partners.
Founded in the United States in 2021 by CEO Kim Tae-hoon — a semiconductor industry veteran born in 1970 who worked on memory chip development at Samsung Electronics and Micron Technology before spending more than a decade at SK Hynix, rising to vice president — iHW is a fabless company developing ultra-low-power AI semiconductor chips. The company established a Korean subsidiary in 2024 and has been raising capital domestically since. iHW’s core technology applies analog computing techniques to a chip’s internal computation architecture to achieve extremely low power consumption. Unlike conventional digital neural processing units (NPUs), which read weights from memory and then move them to separate computation circuits — a process that consumes significant energy and time — iHW’s chip performs calculations directly where the weights are stored, reducing the energy and latency associated with repeatedly transporting data.
The company has been recognized for this technology and is currently collaborating with the Korea Electronics Technology Institute’s Intelligent Semiconductor Device Research Center on developing certain elements of an AI system-on-chip (SoC).
iHW said it will use the new capital to mass-produce its edge AI chip, produce prototypes of its large language model (LLM) chip, fund marketing efforts, and hire additional staff. The company’s Series A comes amid a broader run-up in valuations across Korea’s AI semiconductor sector, with peers such as Rebellions, DeepX, and FuriosaAI recently closing Series D rounds at valuations approaching KRW 3 trillion.
