[IT Cafe] PuriOsa Attracts Top AI Talent, Gains Momentum Ahead of IPO

"Annual Sales to Reach 80–100 Billion Won This Year"
More SNU and Science High School Graduates Joining the Company

"We are seeing a surge in applicants with impressive backgrounds, such as top graduates from Seoul National University College of Engineering, alumni of science high schools, and Olympiad award winners."

Furiosa AI, a company specializing in Neural Processing Units (NPUs), is receiving considerable attention from outstanding science and engineering talent. In a recent meeting at its headquarters in Sinsa-dong, Gangnam-gu, Seoul, a senior executive of the company stated, "We are seeing more new hires who are top graduates from prestigious engineering schools in Korea." He added, "While it is common for experienced professionals from Samsung Electronics and SK hynix to join us, recently, even university graduates with a challenging spirit are knocking on our doors."

According to Saramin, as of 2024, the average annual salary at the company is 96.81 million won, and it was recently reported to have surpassed 100 million won. Furiosa AI last year recruited Jihoon Kang, an associate professor from the Department of Computer Science at KAIST, who is considered one of Korea’s leading researchers in systems, computational theory, and programming languages, as Chief Research Officer (CRO). The appointment of Youngjin Cho, former executive director of Samsung Electronics’ Memory Division, as vice president of hardware, also drew significant attention. Junho Baek, the CEO with development experience at Samsung Electronics and AMD, has put great effort into scouting talented personnel, resulting in more young engineers applying to join the company.

Ha Changwoo, Vice President of Furiosa AI, explained the company's products and future plans to reporters on the 5th.

Interest among job seekers is especially high because the company is preparing for an initial public offering (IPO), and last year it attracted attention by reportedly rejecting an acquisition offer from Meta. This is also leading to heightened expectations for stock options upon joining. More recently, Jungmin Park, a former executive at Samsung C&T and IGIS Asset Management, joined as IR director. A company representative remarked, "I have been here for six months and I am surprised by the backgrounds of my colleagues," adding, "More than 80 percent of our staff are engineers, and many are graduates of KAIST or Seoul National University, with lots of top engineering graduates among them."

Furiosa AI is a domestic AI semiconductor startup emerging as a competitor to Nvidia. As a fabless (semiconductor design) company developing AI accelerators specialized for inference computation in generative AI services, Furiosa AI is currently focusing on mass production and overseas supply of its second-generation AI inference accelerator, Renegade (RNGD). At a roundtable with the media on August 5, Furiosa AI Vice President Ha Changwoo announced, "We plan to produce 20,000 units of Renegade this year, achieving annual sales of between 80 billion and 100 billion won." He further revealed, "We are currently collaborating with Broadcom to develop a third-generation AI accelerator utilizing TSMC's 2nm process (1nm = one billionth of a meter) and HBM4 (High Bandwidth Memory 4), with the goal of providing samples in the first half of 2028."

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.