Axelera AI, a leading provider of purpose-built AI hardware acceleration technology for generative AI and computer vision inference, announced a successful closing of an oversubscribed $68 million Series B funding round, bringing the total amount raised to $120 million.
Axelera AI is backed by major institutional investors, including Invest-NL Deep Tech Fund, the European Innovation Council Fund, Innovation Industries Strategic Partners Fund (backed by Dutch Pension Funds PMT and PME, administered by MN) and Samsung Catalyst Fund, along with existing investors Verve Ventures, Innovation Industries, Fractionelera and the Italian sovereign fund CDP Venture Capital SGR.
This new funding adds to previously raised funds, including the innovation credit from RVO, and equity investment from Bitfury, CDP Venture Capital, Federal Holding and Investment Company of Belgium (SFPIM), imec, imec.xpand, and Innovation Industries.
In just about three years, Axelera AI built a solid team of 180+ employees (including 55+ PhDs with more than 40,000 citations), launched its Metis AI Platform, which achieves a 3-5x increase in efficiency and performance and has visibility into a strong business pipeline that surpasses $100 million. This has attracted diverse, global funding from venture capital, sovereign wealth, and pension funds.
Companies are embracing new ways to integrate computer vision and Gen AI capabilities into business models. However, challenges associated with energy consumption, cost, limited supply, and scalability are inhibiting AI’s true potential. Axelera AI addresses these exact industry challenges by providing a solution that delivers unmatched performance and efficiency. This new funding enables Axelera AI to grow its high-demand AI inference solutions based on its proprietary digital in-memory computing and RISC-V technology.
This Series B funding fosters global expansion for Axelera AI with a focus on growth opportunities in North America, Europe, and the Middle East. And the capital facilitates expansion across key vertical markets like automotive, digital healthcare, Industry 4.0, retail, robots, drones, surveillance, etc.
This funding also enables Axelera AI to broaden its future product offerings from the edge to the data center to address the growing computing needs for Gen AI, large language models (LLMs) and large multi-modal models. This 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.
The combination of Axelera AI’s experienced Board of Directors, the executive leadership team and this Series B investment positions Axelera AI to build upon its early customer momentum and further support the needs of AI innovators across vertical markets. And Axelera AI customers are currently utilizing the Metis AI Platform within their products to differentiate the unique offerings they bring to their respective markets.
KEY QUOTES:
“There’s no denying that the AI industry has the potential to transform a multitude of sectors. However, to truly harness the value of AI, organizations need a solution that delivers high-performance and efficiency while balancing cost. This funding supports our mission to democratize access to artificial intelligence, from the edge to the cloud. By expanding our product lines beyond the edge computing market, we are able to address industry challenges in AI inference and support current and future AI processing needs with our scalable, proven technology.”
- Fabrizio Del Maffeo, Co-Founder and CEO at Axelera AI
“We are 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. 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.”
- Marco Chisari, Head of Samsung Semiconductor Innovation Center and Executive Vice President, Samsung Electronics
“Axelera AI’s Series B funding round, with backing from venture capital, sovereign and pension funds, underscores the company’s record of delivering industry defining solutions for customers to meet the growing demand for generative AI and computer vision. With this new funding, Axelera AI will be able to continue to build upon its product offerings and expand into additional markets, in alignment with the progression of the market for GenAI.”
- Inder Singh, Axelera AI board member and former CFO of Arm
