Edge artificial intelligence chip startup Axelera AI B.V., a Netherlands-based company that makes purpose-built silicon for generative AI and computer vision, today announced it has raised $68 million in new funding.

The company’s Series B funding round is Europe’s largest oversubscribed Series B round in the fabless semiconductor industry and brings Axelera’s total funding to date to $120 million.

Major institutional investors joining in the oversubscribed round included Invest-NL Deep Tech Fund, the European Innovation Council Fund, the Innovation Industries Strategic Partners Fund and the Samsung Catalyst Fund. Existing investors also participating included Verve Ventures, Innovation Industries, Fractionelera and the Italian sovereign fund CDP Venture Capital SGR.

Founded in 2021, Axelera AI is the developer of specialized computer chip hardware optimized to run AI software at the network edge, outside data centers. Its compute platform hardware accelerates AI inference, the processing that chatbots and computer vision do, more efficiently and closer to the point where the data is produced.

The startup believes that by putting its technology closer to the point where the AI processing needs to happen, it can speed up AI interactions. This will allow AI to have greater impact and control when run across connected devices such as internet of things systems and industrial robots.

“There’s no denying that the AI industry has the potential to transform a multitude of sectors,” said Fabrizio Del Maffeo, co-founder and chief executive at Axelera AI. “However, to truly harness the value of AI, organizations need a solution that delivers high performance and efficiency while balancing cost.”

The company’s flagship product is the Metis AI Platform, a system based on the company’s chip, which is said to be capable of 214 trillion computations per second, or 214 TOPS. According to Axelera, the platform is not just highly performant but is also very energy-efficient compared with traditional chips, making it highly suitable for edge devices. Many connected devices must run on battery for protracted periods.

Axelera said that it would use the funding to expand its sights towards broadening product offerings from the edge to cloud data centers to address the needs of generative AI, large language models and multi-modal models. Not all machine learning and AI can run on the edge, since some processing requires heavy lifting in data centers.

“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,” said Del Maffeo.

With this market expansion, Axelera will include high-performance computing by designing high-efficiency, high-performance but price-completive AI accelerators that can help when AI inference needs to scale out of the edge and must be migrated into the cloud. The company said that the new chips will power future high-performance exascale and petascale data centers.

Image: Axelera