www.eenewseurope.com, Jun. 27, 2024 –
Dutch edge AI chip developer Axelera AI has raised $68m in an oversubscribed round as it looks to expand to the data centre
The Series B financing round brings the total amount raised to $120m for Axelera. The funding will be used for expansion into the US and Middle East and a move into automotive, digital healthcare, Industry 4.0, retail, robots & drones and surveillance systems that have already been detailed in eeNews Europe.
The company says it has a pipeline of $100m for its Metis AI Platform which achieves a 3-5x increase in efficiency and performance using in memory compute and custom RISC-V cores for computer vision AI. The platform will be in full production in the second half of 2024.
The round was 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.
The 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 generative AI, large language models and large multi-modal models. This market 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 centres.
"There's no denying that the AI industry has the potential to transform a multitude of sectors," said Fabrizio Del Maffeo, Co-Founder and CEO at Axelera AI.
"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."
"The Edge AI market remains a key focus area for Axelera AI. However, as the AI industry has continued to evolve, we have identified opportunities to expand beyond Edge AI into new market segments," the company tells eeNews Europe. "This includes automotive, high-performance computing and the data centre to address the growing computing needs for generative AI, large language models and large multi-modal models."