Axelera AI, a Dutch AI semiconductor start-up, has emerged from stealth with £8.7 million in seed round funding.

The funding was led by Axelera’s incubator company, Bitfury, a security and infrastructure provider for the Bitcoin blockchain. Nanoelectronics R&D centre imec and venture capital Innovation Industries also participated in the seed round.

Axelera is developing a chipset to accelerate AI and machine learning algorithms at the edge. The startup claims that its product will use minimal power consumption at a greatly reduced price compared to its competitors.

Fabrizio del Maffeo, CEO and co-founder of Axelera AI, said: “With our launch as a new independent company and the closing of this investment, Axelera AI is now claiming its place as a significant player in the global AI sector.”

Our extraordinary team merges complementary expertise in software development, image processing, dataflow architecture, in-memory computing, algorithms and quantisation with a proven track record of business success. We look forward to building on our extensive R&D and introducing new solutions across the globe over the next few years.”

Axelera’s chipset is set to release to select customers in 2022.

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