European AI semiconductor leader earns backing from funds managed by Innovation Industries and SiteGround Capital along with EU institutions; edge-first architecture addresses AI’s critical energy and cooling constraints
Axelera AI, the European leader in AI acceleration hardware, announced its latest funding round led by Innovation Industries, with participation from prominent funds and accounts including BlackRock and SiteGround Capital as new investors, as well as existing investors Bitfury, CDP Venture Capital, European Innovation Council Fund, Federal Holding and Investment Company of Belgium (SFPIM), Invest-NL, Samsung Catalyst Fund, and Verve Investments. Axelera AI has attracted over $450 million in equity, grants and venture debt since incorporating in July 2021.
The largest investment ever in an EU AI semiconductor company comes as Axelera ships to its 500th global customer across physical AI and edge AI in industries including defense and public safety, industrial manufacturing, retail, agritech, robotics, and security, firmly establishing the company as the global leader in power-efficient AI inference solutions.
Axelera AI’s success is rooted in a fundamental insight: to deploy AI at scale, the industry 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. And by providing high performance at the edge, companies can process data locally, which preserves privacy for their users and supports the increasing demand for sovereign solutions.
“Data centers are hitting power and cooling limits, and as analytics move closer to where data is being created, edge AI solutions must operate within strict energy and bandwidth constraints,” said Fabrizio Del Maffeo, CEO and co-founder of Axelera AI. “We designed our architecture from the ground up to overcome these obstacles. Our edge-first approach isn’t just about efficiency; it’s about making AI deployment economically viable at scale for real-world applications while protecting data and privacy by processing customer information locally.”
Inference is projected to be a more than $250B market by 2030i. Over the life of a model, the cost of inference is 15x more than training and utilization is growing at 31x per yearii. But many organizations still struggle to transition from AI projects to generating value in production. Axelera’s tightly co-designed hardware/software solution simplifies deployment and maximizes performance of inference-based workloads. Axelera AI’s Europa and Metis platforms deliver the price/performance balance enterprise customers need while operating within the energy and thermal constraints of edge computing.
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