Axelera AI, a Dutch startup, has secured $68 million in series B funding, making it Europe’s largest Series B round in the fabless semiconductor category. The company is focused on AI acceleration for edge computing applications and has developed a platform called Metis. This platform consists of a 12nm CMOS AI Processing Unit (AIPU) and a software development kit that allows for the easy building of computer vision applications. Each AIPU has four AI cores that can collaborate on workloads or process different neural networks simultaneously. The AIPU delivers up to 53.5 TOPS of AI processing power and offers balanced performance over a wide range of layers. It also uses proprietary digital in-memory computing technology for energy efficiency. With this funding, Axelera plans to expand its operations to North America, Europe, and the Middle East, focusing on key verticals such as automotive, digital healthcare, Industry 4.0, retail, robots & drones, and surveillance. The company aims to address the growing computing needs for generative AI models, including large multimodal models. Fabrizio Del Maffeo, co-founder and CEO of Axelera AI, stated that the funding supports their mission to democratize access to artificial intelligence and deliver high performance and efficiency while balancing costs. This funding will help Axelera scale up production and meet the increasing demand for its products, which offer significant improvements in efficiency and performance for enterprises. Axelera’s expansion plans include launching price-competitive, data center-focused accelerators to address future AI processing needs.
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