In just three years, Axelera AI has established a team of 180+ employees (including 55+ PhD’s with more than 40,000 citations), launched the Metis AI Platform and has developed a strong business pipeline worth in excess of $100m. This success has attracted diverse, global funding from venture capital, sovereign wealth and pension funds.
Axelera AI's Series B funding round is Europe’s largest oversubscribed Series B funding round in the fabless semiconductor industry and was backed by major institutional investors, including Invest-NL Deep Tech Fund, the European Innovation Council Fund, Innovation Industries Strategic Partners Fund (backed by Dutch Pension Funds PMT and PME, administered by MN) and Samsung Catalyst Fund, along with existing investors Verve Ventures, Innovation Industries, Fractionelera and the Italian sovereign fund CDP Venture Capital SGR.
The new capital adds to previously raised funds, including the innovation credit from RVO, and equity investment from Bitfury, CDP Venture Capital, Federal Holding and Investment Company of Belgium (SFPIM), imec, imec.xpand and Innovation Industries.
While companies are embracing new and innovative ways to incorporate computer vision and generative AI capabilities into business models, there are significant challenges associated with energy consumption, cost, limited supply and scalability which are seen as inhibiting the true potential of AI.
Axelera AI looks to offer a solution that delivers both performance and efficiency, and this new capital will enable the company to grow its high demand AI inference solutions based on its proprietary digital in-memory computing and RISC-V technology.
The Series B funding is also expected to help in terms of global expansion for Axelera AI with a focus on growth opportunities in North America, Europe and the Middle East. In addition, the capital facilitates expansion across key vertical markets such as automotive, digital healthcare, Industry 4.0, retail, robots & drones, and surveillance.
The funding also enables Axelera AI to broaden its future product offerings from the edge to the data centre to address the growing computing needs for generative AI, large language models and large multi-modal models. This market expansion includes high-performance computing by designing high efficiency, high-performance and price-competitive AI accelerators to power future exa-scale and peta-scale HPC centres.
“There’s no denying that the AI industry has the potential to transform a multitude of sectors,” said Fabrizio Del Maffeo, Co-Founder and CEO at Axelera AI. “However, to truly harness the value of AI, organisations need a solution that delivers high-performance and efficiency while balancing cost. This funding supports our mission to democratise access to artificial intelligence, from the edge to the cloud. By expanding our product lines beyond the edge computing market, we are able to address industry challenges in AI inference and support current and future AI processing needs with our scalable, proven technology.”
IDC forecasts that IT infrastructure for AI semiconductors will reach $193bn by the end of 2027.
