A new AI story in the midst of the stock market downturn: South Korea's chip unicorn DeepX's valuation soared 4 times to 2.2 billion US dollars

The Zhitong Finance App learned that South Korean AI chip design company DeepX Co. recently completed a new round of financing. The valuation surged about four times over the previous round, reflecting the market's enthusiasm for investing in companies related to the artificial intelligence industry chain. According to people familiar with the matter, the startup, headquartered in Pangyo, Gyeonggi-do, was valued at around 3.14 trillion won (2.2 billion US dollars) in the latest round of transactions. DeepX has signed the first series D financing agreements and received 42 billion won from existing investors BNW Investment Co., and DS Asset Management Co.

As a developer of customized semiconductor architectures for AI tasks, DeepX is currently negotiating additional financing and plans to raise up to 300 billion won by September. According to people familiar with the matter, the company hopes that the post-investment valuation will reach a maximum of 3.5 trillion won after the current round of financing is completed.

DeepX's semiconductor products are mainly aimed at AI workloads and application scenarios outside of data centers, where power consumption and cost efficiency are critical. The company has made robots and intelligent electronic devices a key deployment direction. The sharp rise in valuation reflects the market's growing confidence in its ability to commercialize. In April of this year, DeepX announced that it had obtained more than 30 mass production contracts from customers in eight countries.

The background of the sharp increase in DeepX's valuation comes at a time when the Korean stock market is undergoing drastic adjustments. The Korean stock market has long been highly dependent on the two major memory chip giants Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix. Fluctuations in the semiconductor sector often have a significant impact on overall market sentiment. At a time when AI hardware transactions are undergoing phased adjustments, the market is beginning to find the direction of AI growth in the next stage.

The rise of DeepX is in line with the new trend of the AI industry spreading from cloud data centers to terminal devices. The sharp rise in DeepX's valuation and the acceleration of mass production implementation directly confirm the explosive power of “end-side AI” commercialization. This indicates that edge computing, smart terminals, industrial automation, and robotics concept stocks in the Korean stock market will usher in long-term emotional healing and revaluation. The rise of fabless (fabless) companies, such as DeepX, which focus on NPU/AI architecture design, has demonstrated Korea's ability to make up for shortcomings in the system-level chip field, helping to enhance the valuation center of the Korean semiconductor industry chain as a whole.

DeepX is currently actively advancing preparations for an initial public offering (IPO). As AI chip unicorns such as DeepX and Rebellions accelerate towards the secondary market, the Korean stock market is about to usher in a wave of high-quality AI core asset supply. The valuation level of the primary market reached 2.2 billion US dollars, which also established a higher valuation limit for the same type of science and innovation sector in the secondary market.

DeepX's deep layout in the end-side AI field has begun to feed back the downstream of the industrial chain. Hyundai Motor (Hyundai Motor) has cooperated with DeepX to develop an AI computing platform for robots, and POSCO DX (POSCO DX) is also using its architecture in factory automation. Furthermore, DeepX uses Samsung's advanced foundry technology, and the news will continue to benefit Korea's local wafer foundry ecosystem, semiconductor equipment, and OSAT (sealed testing) related targets.