South Korean AI chip startup Mobilint has closed a Series C round worth approximately $46.4M (₩70 billion), with Praxis Capital Partners, POSCO INVESTMENT, and Company K Partners among the participants. The investment is a vote of confidence in Mobilint’s NPU design chops — particularly its knack for squeezing high performance out of minimal power — and its growing track record of real-world industrial deployments.

The deal didn’t come out of nowhere. Back in February, POSCO INVESTMENT and POSCO DX had already quietly put in $2.0M (₩3 billion) as a pre-investment, telegraphing their strategic intent well before the full round closed. POSCO DX then made things official on April 2, signing a partnership agreement with Mobilint to deploy NPUs across its AI transformation (AX) initiatives.

Under the deal, POSCO DX will embed Mobilint’s NPU into PosMaster — its in-house industrial control system — to enable on-device AI inference and real-time control on the factory floor. The two companies will co-develop and fine-tune POSCO DX’s AI algorithms to run optimally on Mobilint’s NPU hardware, with the shared goal of building out what they’re calling intelligent factories.

“This partnership gives us the LLM-based edge AI capabilities we need to actually make intelligent factories a reality,” said Seokju Cho, head of POSCO DX’s AX Convergence Research Institute. “But we want this to be more than a vendor relationship — we see it as a blueprint for what meaningful collaboration between large industry players and Korean startups can look like, and a stepping stone for the POSCO Group to lead the next wave of manufacturing AI.”

Mobilint’s edge is fairly literal: it’s currently the only Korean company that can run large language models (LLMs) natively in edge environments. Its core products are two homegrown chips — the ARIES AI accelerator and the REGULUS AI SoC — backed by full-stack offerings like the MLX-A1 Edge AI Box, which bundles hardware and software for rapid deployment across manufacturing, retail, and security use cases.

The startup is also co-developing NPU-based solutions with global IT manufacturer Intops, with some of those projects already in mass production.Mobilint says the new capital will go toward next-gen NPU architecture development, ramping up production capacity, pushing into international markets, and building out a broader ecosystem around its chips. The bet is that owning the full stack — from silicon to software to turnkey solutions — is what will set it apart as the global AI semiconductor race heats up.