Dutch AI Semiconductor Startup Axelera AI Launches With $12 Million Seed Round

AI semiconductor startup Axelera AI announced today that it has successfully closed a seed investment round of $12 million.

The round was led by emerging technologies leader Bitfury and joined by global nanoelectronics R&D center imec and deep-tech venture capital funds Innovation Industries and imec.xpand. The funding will support the company's development of an industry-defining product powering AI applications at the edge.

Axelera AI was incubated by Bitfury Group in 2019, formerly operating as Bitfury AI until the company came out as an independent entity this year. Building on its extensive research and development focused on integrating world-class hardware and software technologies for edge and cloud-to-edge enterprise solutions, Axelera AI joined forces with imec in early 2020 to develop groundbreaking computing architecture for high-performance AI. Headquartered in the AI Innovation Center of the High Tech Campus in Eindhoven, Axelera AI also has R&D offices in Leuven (BE) and Zurich (CH). The company has already recruited an elite team of more than 20 senior engineers and developers from world-leading AI companies and research centers, including Intel, Qualcomm, IBM, and imec.

"With our launch as a new independent company and the closing of this investment, Axelera AI is now claiming its place as a significant player in the global AI sector," said Fabrizio del Maffeo, CEO and co-founder of Axelera AI. "Our extraordinary team merges complementary expertise in software development, image processing, dataflow architecture, in-memory computing, algorithms and quantization with a proven track record of business success. We look forward to building on our extensive R&D and introducing new solutions across the globe over the next few years."

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 2022.