Eindhoven, NL – Milan – 27 June 2024 – Axelera AI, a leading provider of AI hardware acceleration technologies specifically designed for generative AI and computer vision inference, today announced the successful closing of a 68 million dollar Series B funding round, bringing total funds raised to 120 million dollars.

In just three years, Axelera AI has built a world-class team of more than 180 people (including over 60 PhDs with more than 40,000 academic citations), launched its Metis™ AI platform, which delivers a 3-5x increase in efficiency and performance, and attracted customer interest for projects worth over 100 million dollars. This success has convinced several global investors – including venture capital firms, sovereign wealth funds and pension funds – to back Axelera AI.

Axelera AI’s Series B funding round is the largest Series B round in Europe in the fabless semiconductor sector. It is backed by major institutional investors, including the European Innovation Council Fund (EIC-A), the Innovation Industries Strategic Partnership Fund (supported by MN/Pension Fund for Metal and Technique), Invest-NL and Samsung Catalyst Fund, together with existing investors Verve Ventures, Innovation Industries, Fractionelera and CDP Venture Capital SGR. The new capital adds to previous funding, including innovation credit from RVO (the Dutch business agency) and earlier investments from Bitfury, CDP Venture Capital, Federal Holding and Investment Company of Belgium (SFPIM), imec, imec.xpand and Innovation Industries.

More and more companies are adopting new and innovative ways to integrate computer vision and generative AI capabilities into their business models. However, challenges related to energy consumption, cost, limited supply and scalability are holding back AI’s true potential. Axelera AI directly addresses these industry-wide challenges by delivering a solution that offers unmatched performance, efficiency and cost. This new capital will enable Axelera AI to scale its high-demand AI inference solutions based on its proprietary digital in-memory computing and RISC-V technology.

Commercial expansion of Axelera AI

Axelera AI’s growth strategy also targets opportunities in new geographic regions and market sectors. Its Series B funding is accelerating Axelera AI’s global commercial expansion, with a particular focus on growth opportunities in North America, Europe and the Middle East.

The capital is also enabling expansion into key vertical markets such as automotive, digital health, Industry 4.0, retail, robotics and drones, surveillance and more. The funding will further allow Axelera AI to broaden its future product offering from edge to data centre to meet growing compute demands for generative AI, large language models and large multimodal models. This market expansion includes high-performance computing, with the design of AI accelerators that are efficient, high-performing and competitively priced to power future HPC centres. Italy will play a key role in chip design, board and system acceleration design and software development. Indeed, Axelera AI has been working in Italy since 2021 and has built strong partnerships with SECO, E4, CINECA and Leonardo, as well as with leading universities and polytechnics.

"There’s no denying that the AI industry has the potential to transform a wide range of sectors”, said Fabrizio Del Maffeo, Co-Founder and CEO of Axelera AI. “However, to truly unlock the value of artificial intelligence, organisations need a solution that delivers high performance and efficiency while balancing cost. This funding supports our mission to democratise access to AI – from edge computing to cloud computing. By expanding our product lines beyond the edge computing market, we can tackle industry challenges in AI inference and support both current and future AI processing needs".

IDC forecasts that AI semiconductor infrastructure will reach 193 billion dollars by the end of 2027. To meet this market demand, Axelera AI’s Metis™ AI Platform – the industry’s most powerful, cost-effective and energy-efficient AI inference processor – will enter full production in the second half of 2024.

“Axelera AI’s Series B funding round, backed by venture capital, sovereign wealth funds and pension funds, underscores the company’s track record of delivering industry-defining solutions to meet growing demand for generative AI and computer vision”, said Inder Singh, board member of Axelera AI and former CFO of Arm. “With this new funding, Axelera AI will be able to continue expanding its product range and enter new markets, in step with the broader GenAI trajectory”.

Axelera AI is currently distributing evaluation kits. More details are available at www.axelera.ai/evaluationkits.
For more information about Axelera AI, visit www.axelera.ai.