European Startup Axelera AI Closes $27M Series A

EINDHOVEN, Netherlands, Oct. 25, 2022 – European AI startup Axelera AI announced today the close of its $27 million Series A investment round. The funding will support Axelera AI’s launch and mass production of its first-generation AI acceleration platform, powered by its in-memory computing and dataflow.

Axelera AI will also further expand its team. Since its inception and initial funding last year, Axelera AI successfully taped-out its first testbench chip, developed entirely in-house, proving the performance and efficiency of in-memory compute for AI computations. In just 14 months the company has also hired more than 80 team members, distributed throughout western Europe. The team hails from 11 European countries and includes nearly 70 senior engineers and developers from world-leading AI companies and research centers like Intel, Qualcomm, IBM and imec. The company plans to expand to the United States and Taiwan this year.

Axelera AI is designing the world’s most efficient and advanced solutions for AI at the edge. Its game-changing hardware and software product will concentrate the AI computational power of an entire server into a single chip at a fraction of the power consumption and price of AI hardware today. The company’s groundbreaking solution will empower thousands of applications of AI at the edge, making the use of AI more efficient and accessible than ever before. Axelera AI’s products will be fully integrated with the leading open-sourced AI frameworks when it launches to select customers and partners in early 2023.

“Our extraordinary team merges complementary expertise in deep learning, in-memory computing, dataflow architecture and AI software with a proven track record of business success,” said Evangelos Eleftheriou, CTO and co-founder of Axelera AI. “We look forward to launching new AI solutions across the globe that will address the demanding requirements of AI applications at the edge.”

The funding round was led by Innovation Industries and joined by imec.xpand and the Federal Holding and Investment Company of Belgium (SFPIM). In addition, the Netherland Enterprise Agency (RVO) awarded Axelera AI with $6.7 million of Innovation Credit (Innovatiekrediet), a special loan reserved for highly innovative and impactful projects, commissioned by the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Climate Policy. Two of these investors previously joined the company’s $12 million seed round last September – European deep tech venture capital funds Innovation Industries and imec.xpand.

“Axelera AI is a unique Dutch start-up on a journey to deliver a disruptive AI chip that will accelerate the application of AI at the ‘edge of IOT’,” according to Sander Verbrugge, Partner at Innovation Industries. “Affordable AI compute power operating at low power is essential to unlock the full potential of AI in our everyday lives. We are proud to be part of this journey and to support this world-class team achieve its ambitions.”

“Axelera AI has brought together a stellar team and, as such unites several distinct in-memory compute efforts from across Europe under one roof. We very much look forward to continuing our support of the company and the team and help them to achieve their ambitious goals by leveraging imec.xpand’s cross-border, value-add platform and network,” said Cyril Vančura, Partner at imec.xpand.

To its non-executive board, Axelera AI has welcomed Jonathan Ballon, former Vice President and General Manager of Intel’s Edge AI and IoT business alongside Cyril Vančura, Partner at imec.xpand, Sander Verbrugge, partner at Innovation Industries, and Valery Vavilov, founder & CVO at Bitfury group, will also serve as a non-executive directors. Marc Ceurremans from the SFPIM will serve as board observer.

Per today, Jonathan Ballon will serve as Chairman of Axelera AI.

“Every industry is on the precipice of creating unprecedented breakthroughs in customer value by harnessing the world’s exponentially growing data set. To do so will require technology that is purpose-built for the task. Axelera AI’s groundbreaking AI platforms promise to usher in this new era in computing, and I am privileged to work alongside the leadership team and fellow Board members to accelerate the company’s trajectory.” said Jonathan Ballon, Chairman of Axelera AI.

Axelera AI will announce its first product soon and begin raising for its Series B later this year.

About Axelera

Axelera AI is designing the world’s most powerful and advanced solutions for AI at the edge. Its game-changing hardware and software product will concentrate the AI computational power of an entire server into a single chip at a fraction of the power consumption and price of AI hardware today. Headquartered in the AI Innovation Center of the High Tech Campus in Eindhoven, Axelera AI has R&D offices in Belgium, Switzerland, and Italy. Its team of experts in AI software and hardware hail from top AI firms and Fortune 500 companies.

Source: Axelera AI