News Highlights:
-
Driving Global Innovation: Mass deployment of Axelera AI's Metis™ AI Processing Unit (AIPU), the world's most powerful AIPU for edge devices, will power next-generation AI inference solutions for computer vision and generative AI.
-
Accelerating Market Expansion: The oversubscribed Series B funding, Europe's largest in fabless semiconductors, will see Axelera AI expand into new markets such as automotive and high-performance computing.
-
Accelerate business momentum: With a $100 million business pipeline and strong customer demand, Axelera AI has established itself as the partner of choice for the AI industry to unleash innovation.
Axelera AI is a leading provider of AI hardware acceleration technology. Generative AI Axelera AI, a global leader in computer vision inference, announced the completion of a $68M Series B funding round, exceeding expectations and bringing total funding to $120M. In just three years, Axelera AI has built a world-class team of 180+ employees (including 55+ PhDs with 40K+ citations), launched the Metis AI platform that delivers 3-5x improvements in efficiency and performance, and has a robust business pipeline outlook of over $100M. This success has attracted diverse, global funding from venture capitalists, sovereign wealth funds, and pension funds.
Latest AiThority.com News: AItoHuman.ai releases new AI-to-human text transcription tool
“There's no denying that the AI industry has the potential to bring about change in many different fields.”
Axelera AI's Series B funding round is the largest oversubscribed Series B in the fabless semiconductor industry in Europe and is backed by leading institutional investors such as Invest-NL Deep Tech Fund, European Innovation Council Fund, Innovation Industries Strategic Partners Fund (backed by Dutch pension funds PMT and PME and managed by MN), Samsung Catalyst Fund, as well as existing investors Verve Ventures, Innovation Industries, Fractionelera and Italian sovereign wealth fund CDP Venture Capital SGR. The new funding adds to previous funding, which includes Innovation Credit from RVO and equity investments from Bitfury, CDP Venture Capital, the Belgian Federal Investment Company (SFPIM), imec, imec.xpand and Innovation Industries.
Enterprises are embracing new and innovative ways to incorporate computer vision and generative AI capabilities into their business models. However, challenges related to energy consumption, cost, supply limitations and scalability are holding back AI's true potential. Axelera AI addresses precisely these industry challenges by delivering solutions that deliver unparalleled performance and efficiency. This new capital will enable Axelera AI to grow its in-demand AI inference solutions based on its proprietary digital in-memory computing and RISC-V technology.
Axelera AI's growth strategy also focuses on opportunities in new geographies and market segments. The Series B funding will accelerate Axelera AI's global expansion with a focus on growth opportunities in North America, Europe, and the Middle East. Additionally, the funding will fuel expansion into key vertical markets such as automotive, digital healthcare, Industry 4.0, retail, robotics and drones, and surveillance. The funding will also enable 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 multimodal models. This market expansion includes high performance computing through the design of highly efficient, high performance, and price competitive AI accelerators to power future exascale and petascale HPC centers.
“There's no denying the AI industry's potential to transform many sectors,” said Fabrizio Del Maffeo, co-founder and CEO of Axelera AI. “But to truly leverage the value of AI, organizations need solutions that deliver high performance and efficiency while balancing costs. This funding supports our mission to democratize access to artificial intelligence from the edge to the cloud. By expanding our product line beyond the edge computing market, we can address industry challenges in AI inference and support current and future AI processing needs with our scalable, proven technology.”
Latest AiThority.com News: Cloudera Introduces New AI Assistant to Drive Valuable Data Insights
IDC predicts that IT infrastructure for AI semiconductors will reach $193 billion by the end of 2027. To address this market demand, Axelera AI's Metis™ AI platform, the industry's most powerful, cost-effective and energy-efficient AI processing unit for inference, is scheduled to enter full production in the second half of 2024.
“We are excited to support Axelera AI's Series B funding. The company is introducing a highly innovative approach to enable high-performance AI acceleration at the edge by implementing digital in-memory computing,” said Marco Chisari, executive vice president and head of the Semiconductor Innovation Center at Samsung Electronics. “Axelera AI's architecture aims to minimize data movement between memory and computing elements, overcoming the challenge of the 'memory wall'. It also has the potential to significantly reduce power consumption, a key attribute for AI applications at the edge and beyond.”
“Axelera AI's Series B funding round, backed by venture capital, sovereign wealth funds and pension funds, highlights the company's track record of providing customers with industry-defining solutions to address the growing demand for generative AI and computer vision,” said Inder Singh, Axelera AI's board member and former CFO of Arm. “This new funding will enable Axelera AI to continue to strengthen its product lineup and expand into new markets as the GenAI market evolves.”
The combination of Axelera AI's experienced board of directors, executive leadership team and this Series B investment will enable Axelera AI to build on its early customer momentum and further support the needs of AI innovators across vertical markets. Axelera AI's customers are currently leveraging the Metis AI platform within their cutting-edge products to differentiate their unique offerings to their respective markets.
Latest AiThority.com News: RELEX Introduces AI-Driven CO2 Analytics to Help Businesses Understand and Reduce Their Environmental Impact
[To share your insights with us as part of editorial or sponsored content, please write to psen@itechseries.com]
