Dutch AI Semiconductor Start-up Axelera AI Launches with a $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 Fund 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 research and development focused on integrating hardware and software technologies for edge and cloud-to-edge enterprise solutions, Axelera AI has also joined forces with imec since early 2020 to develop 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 a team of more than 20 engineers and developers from AI companies and research centers, including Intel, Qualcomm, IBM, and imec.

“With our launch as a new and 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 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, and we look forward to building on our extensive R&D, introducing new solutions across the globe in the next few years.”