Axelera AI receives $68 million Series B funding

SILICON VALLEY, Calif. and EINDHOVEN, Netherlands – Axelera AI, a provider of purpose-built artificial intelligence (AI) hardware acceleration technology for generative AI and computer vision inference, announced the successful closing of an oversubscribed $68 million Series B financing round.

With this latest round, the total raised is $120 million. Over the past three years, Axelera AI has built a team of over 180 employees (including over 55 PhDs with more than 40,000 citations, according to the company), launched its Metis AI platform, and has a strong deal pipeline valued at over $100 million. This success has attracted diverse, global funding from venture capitalists, sovereign wealth funds, and pension funds, it says.

Axelera AI’s Series B funding round is Europe’s largest oversubscribed Series B funding round in the fabless semiconductor industry. It is supported by major institutional investors including Invest-NL Deep Tech Fund, the European Innovation Council Fund, Innovation Industries Strategic Partners Fund and Samsung Catalyst Fund, to name a few. The new capital complements previously raised funds including the Innovation Loan from RVO and equity investments from Bitfury, CDP Venture Capital, Federal Holding and Investment Company of Belgium (SFPIM), imec, imec.xpand and Innovation Industries.

Axelera AI said its growth strategy also eyes opportunities in new geographies and market sectors. The Series B funding will fuel Axelera AI’s global expansion, with a focus on growth opportunities in North America, Europe and the Middle East. In addition, the capital will facilitate expansion into key vertical markets such as automotive, digital healthcare, Industry 4.0, retail, robots and drones, surveillance and more.

“There is no denying that the AI ​​industry has the potential to transform a wide range of industries,” said Fabrizio Del Maffeo, co-founder and CEO of Axelera AI. “However, to truly realize the value of AI, companies need a solution that delivers high performance and efficiency at a balanced cost. This funding supports our mission to democratize access to artificial intelligence, from the edge to the cloud. By expanding our product lines beyond the edge computing market, we can address industry challenges in the AI ​​inference space and support current and future AI processing needs with our scalable, proven technology.”

“We are very pleased to support Axelera AI in its Series B funding round. The company is introducing a very innovative approach to high-performance AI acceleration at the edge by implementing Digital In-Memory Computing,” said Marco Chisari, Head of Samsung Semiconductor Innovation Center and Executive Vice President of Samsung Electronics. “Axelera AI’s architecture minimizes data movement between memory and compute elements and aims to overcome the ‘memory wall’ challenge. It also promises a significant reduction in power consumption, a critical feature for AI applications at the edge and beyond.”

Axelera AI is currently shipping evaluation kits. For more details, see https://www.axelera.ai/metis-evaluation-kit.