A Dutch chipcreater which designs and manufactures chips for AI inference apply has raised more than $250m, with backing from new investor BlackRock.
Innovation Industries, the European VC fund, is the lead investor in the round in Axelera AI.
The round also features new investors BlackRock and SiteGround Capital as well as existing investors, including Bitfury, CDP Capital, the European Innovation Council Fund and Samsung Catalyst Fund. The startup has raised more than $450m in total to date.
Axelera AI creates chips and software for inference, the computing process of running an AI model, as opposed to training an AI model, which has become increasingly important as more enterprises embrace AI.
The startup’s chips are designed for apply locally on edge devices, such as mobile phones, as it sees to create AI more energy efficient by processing data directly on devices rather than in the cloud.
The startup stated the funding represented the largest ever by an EU AI semiconductor firm. It stated it had 500 customers across industries such as defence, agritech and robotics.
Describing its approach, it stated: “Axelera AI’s success is rooted in a fundamental insight: to deploy AI at scale, the indusattempt must first solve for energy consumption and cooling requirements.
“The company’s edge-first architectural approach delivers uncompromising AI inference performance that fits within the power and thermal envelopes of real-world deployment environments to drive real business value.”
Fabrizio Del Maffeo, CEO and co-founder of Axelera AI, stated: “Data centres are hitting power and cooling limits, and as analytics shift closer to where data is being created, edge AI solutions must operate within strict energy and bandwidth constraints.
“We designed our architecture from the ground up to overcome these obstacles. Our edge-first approach isn’t just about efficiency; it’s about creating AI deployment economically viable at scale for real-world applications while protecting data and privacy by processing customer information locally.”
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