Axelera AI, an Eindhoven, Netherlands-based AI startup, announced that it closed a $27 million Series A funding round 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.
The funding will support Axelera AI’s launch and mass production of its first-generation AI acceleration platform, powered by its disruptive in-memory computing and dataflow. The company plans to expand to the United States and Taiwan this year.
Axelera AI will also further expand its team. Since its inception and initial funding last year, Axelera AI has successfully taped out its first testbench chip, developed entirely in-house, proving the performance and efficiency of in-memory computing for AI computations.
“The closing of this investment round comes just few months after our announcement of the Thetis Core, which proved to the AI community the advantages of our technology. The strong commitment of our investors only further confirms that there is space and need in the European AI landscape for a leader. We are excited to take on this responsibility and are determined to strengthen Europe’s presence in the global AI sector,” said Fabrizio del Maffeo, CEO, and co-founder of Axelera AI.
In addition to the investment round, 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, to its non-executive board. Marc Ceurremans from the SFPIM will serve as a board observer. Jonathan Ballon will serve as Chairman of Axelera AI
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.
Company: Axelera AI B.V.
Raised: $27.0M
Round: Series A
Funding Month: October 2022
Lead Investors: Innovation Industries
Additional Investors: imec.xpand and the Federal Holding and Investment Company of Belgium (SFPIM)
Company Website: https://www.axelera.ai/
Software Category: AI hardware & software platform for edge computing
About the Company: Axelera AI was originally incubated by Bitfury Group in 2019 and led by CEO Fabrizio del Maffeo. Axelera AI is designing the world’s most powerful and advanced solutions for AI at the edge. Its game-changing hardware and software products 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. It's AI software and hardware experts hail from top AI firms and Fortune 500 companies. The company has hired more than 80 team members, distributed between its headquarters at the High Tech Campus in Eindhoven (NL), its R&D offices in Leuven (BE) and Zurich (CH), its newest offices in Milan (IT) and Bristol (UK), and its Europe-wide remote locations. 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.
Source: https://www.axelera.ai/european-ai-startup-axelera-ai-closes-27-million-series-a/