Axelera AI

Axelera AI is a Netherlands-based chip company founded in 2021.^[1] It develops AI processing units (AIPU) for robots and drones, as well as cars, medical devices, and security cameras.^[2][3] The company's CEO is Fabrizio Del Maffeo.^[4][3] In 2025, it received a grant of €61.6 million to develop its Titania chip for generative AI and computer vision processing from the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking DARE project.^[5] Previously it raised $200 million from Samsung and other investors.^[6]

Funding

Axelera AI has raised multiple rounds of venture capital and public funding since its founding.

In 2021, the company raised approximately US$12 million in seed financing.^[7] In October 2022, Axelera AI secured a Series A funding round of about US$27 million, led by Innovation Industries, and additionally received an innovation credit from the Dutch government valued at approximately US$6.7 million.^[8] A follow‑on Series A extension in 2023 brought total Series A funding to around US$50 million.

On 27 June 2024, Axelera AI announced a Series B round of roughly US$68 million, described as one of Europe's largest oversubscribed Series B rounds in the fabless semiconductor sector.^[9] Investors included the European Innovation Council Fund, Innovation Industries, Invest-NL, Samsung Catalyst Fund, Verve Ventures, Bitfury, and SFPIM.

In March 2025, the company was awarded a grant of up to €61.6 million from the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking as part of the DARE (Digital Autonomy with RISC‑V for Europe) project to support the development of a high‑performance AI chiplet.^[10]

By mid‑2025, Axelera AI was estimated to have raised more than US$200 million (over €200 million) in combined equity investment and public grants. In August 2025, reports indicated the company was seeking an additional funding round exceeding €150 million to expand its activities in edge‑AI and data‑centre markets.^[11]

Products

Metis

Axelera AI’s first commercial chip family, Metis, is designed for edge-AI inference workloads such as computer vision, robotics, and embedded industrial applications. The Metis AIPU delivers a peak performance of up to 214 TOPS (INT8) with an efficiency of approximately 15 TOPS/W.^[12] It is offered in several form factors, including M.2 accelerator modules, PCIe cards with one Metis processor, and higher-performance accelerator cards integrating four Metis AIPUs (up to ~856 TOPS).^[13]

The Metis platform is supported by the company’s Voyager SDK and a model library aimed at simplifying deployment of AI inference at the edge.^[14]

Europa

In 2025 Axelera AI introduced Europa, a next-generation inference processor targeting edge servers, enterprise systems, and rack-mount deployments. The chip is specified to provide up to 629 TOPS (INT8).^[15] Europa incorporates Axelera’s second-generation digital-in-memory-compute (D-IMC) architecture across eight AI cores, along with two clusters of RISC-V vector cores used for pre- and post-processing operations.^[16] The design includes 64 GB of memory, 200 Gb/s DRAM bandwidth, and 128 MB of on-chip L2 SRAM.^[16]

Shipments of Europa-based PCIe accelerators are expected to begin in the first half of 2026.^[17]

Titania and Future Development

Axelera AI has announced development of a future high-performance inference processor codenamed Titania, intended for data-centre-class compute and large-scale AI inference. In 2025 the company received funding from the EU’s EuroHPC Joint Undertaking to support the development of this RISC-V-based architecture.^[18]