FuriosaAI and Helikai Partner on Enterprise AI Stack
AI semiconductor firm FuriosaAI and Micro-AI agent company Helikai announced a strategic partnership. The collaboration aims to deliver a secure, production-ready AI automation stack for enterprises. The partnership will focus on solutions for regulated and precision-critical industries.
- FuriosaAI, a South Korean semiconductor company, recently achieved unicorn status after a Series C bridge funding round in August 2025, securing approximately $123 million and pushing its valuation past $770 million. Key investors include state-backed institutions like the Korea Development Bank and tech giants like Kakao Investment. - The company's second-generation AI inference chip, RNGD (pronounced "Renegade"), is central to the partnership and is manufactured using TSMC's 5-nanometer process with HBM3 memory from SK Hynix. FuriosaAI, led by CEO and co-founder June Paik, who previously worked at Samsung and AMD, was reportedly considered for acquisition by Meta in 2025. - Helikai, founded in 2025, specializes in "Helibots"—reusable, single-purpose AI agents designed for specific enterprise workflows in sectors like life sciences and legal services. The company was co-founded by Jamie Lerner, who previously worked at a public company with fellow co-founder Ross Fujii. - Helikai's platform is built on a Secure Private Retrieval-Augmented Generation (SPRAG) architecture, which is model-agnostic and designed to address enterprise concerns around data sovereignty by allowing agents to be trained on private, proprietary data. - The partnership aims to create a full-stack solution by running Helikai's specialized "Micro-AI" agents on FuriosaAI's power-efficient inference hardware. This addresses a key market need for AI that moves beyond informational queries to execute complex, multi-step tasks autonomously. - This collaboration targets the emerging "Agentic AI" market, which is projected to grow to between $24.5 billion and $48.2 billion by 2030, reflecting a shift from general-purpose AI tools to autonomous systems integrated into core business operations. - Prior to this partnership, FuriosaAI's hardware has already been adopted by major players; for instance, LG AI Research uses the RNGD chip to power its EXAONE large language models and enterprise AI agent. - The joint stack is designed for precision-critical industries where auditability and predictable performance are essential. Helikai's technology provides a framework for human-in-the-loop intervention and can reduce the token usage and transaction costs associated with large model deployments.
