Axelera raises $68M Series B funding to accelerate next-gen AI

Eindhoven-headquartered Axelera AI has announced the close of a 68-million-dollar Series B financing round. After an equally oversubscribed Series A round, this brings the total amount raised to 120 million dollars. The new capital enables the European scale-up to grow its AI inference solutions based on its proprietary digital in-memory computing and RISC-V technology. In just three years, the company has built a team of 180+ employees in 18 countries and it has visibility into a strong business pipeline exceeding 100 million dollars.

Axelera provides purpose-built AI hardware acceleration technology for AI inference, including computer vision and generative AI applications. Its first-generation product is the Metis platform, a holistic hardware and software solution for edge AI inference that achieves a 3-5x increase in efficiency and performance at a fraction of the cost of alternative solutions. Headquartered in the AI Innovation Center of the High Tech Campus Eindhoven, the company has R&D offices in Belgium, Switzerland, Italy and the UK.

The Series B funding fosters global expansion for Axelera with a focus on growth opportunities in North America, Europe and the Middle East and across key vertical markets such as automotive, healthcare, Industry 4.0, retail, robots and drones, surveillance and more. The money also enables the company to broaden its future product offerings from the edge to the data center to address the growing computing needs for generative AI, large language models and large multi-modal models. This market expansion includes high-performance computing by designing high-efficiency, high-performance and price-competitive AI accelerators to power future exa-scale and peta-scale HPC centers.

Axelera’s success has attracted diverse, global funding from venture capital, sovereign wealth and pension funds. The company is backed by major institutional investors, including Invest-NL Deep Tech Fund, the European Innovation Council Fund, Innovation Industries Strategic Partners Fund and Samsung Catalyst Fund, along with existing investors Verve Ventures, Innovation Industries, Fractionelera and the Italian sovereign fund CDP Venture Capital. The new capital adds to previously raised funds, including the innovation credit from the Netherlands Enterprise Agency (RVO), and equity investment from Bitfury, CDP, the Federal Holding and Investment Company of Belgium (SFPIM), Imec, Imec.xpand and Innovation Industries.

“We’re very excited to support Axelera AI in their Series B financing. The company introduces a very innovative approach for high-performance AI acceleration at the edge, by implementing digital in-memory computing,” says 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, aiming to overcome the “Memory Wall” challenge. It also has the promise of significantly reducing power consumption, a critical attribute for AI applications at the edge and beyond.”