AI semiconductor startup Axelera AI 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 as well as deep-tech venture capital funds Innovation Industries and imec.xpand.
The funding is intended to support the company’s development of an industry-defining product powering AI applications at the edge.
Bitfury Group incubated Axelera AI in 2019; the firm was originally known as Bitfury AI until it became an independent organization in 2019. Axelera AI joined forces with imec in early 2020 to develop a groundbreaking computing architecture for high-performance AI, building on its extensive research and development efforts focused on integrating world-class hardware and software technologies for edge and cloud-to-edge enterprise solutions. Axelera AI is based in Eindhoven’s AI Innovation Center, but it also has R&D centers in Leuven (BE) and Zurich (CH).
“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.”
About Axelera AI
Axelera AI says it designs the most efficient and sophisticated solutions for edge AI in the world. They have developed a revolutionary hardware and software product that will consolidate the AI processing capacity of an entire server onto a single chip at a fraction of the power consumption and cost of AI hardware today.
Through the revolutionary solution provided by the firm, hundreds of AI apps will be empowered at the edge to increase the efficiency and accessibility of AI use. By early 2022, Axelera AI’s solutions will be available to a restricted group of clients and partners who can use them with the top open-source AI frameworks.
