A chip making company that identifies itself as a non-conventional deep-tech enterprise and believes in the power of Artificial Intelligence to improve day-to-day life, Netherlands-based Axelera, within just three years of its inception, is guided by a vision that takes into consideration aspects of sustainability, while revolutionizing the field of AI.
In October this year, Axelera AI, one of the few companies in Europe making specialized computer chips for AI applications, announced that it will launch its second product line.
Axelera has been developing a cutting-edge hardware and software platform for accelerating inference, wherever you want to compute it. This is a giant leap since July 2021, when Axelera taped out three chips (AI Processing Units) and introduced its Metis AI Platform. The hardware and software platform, consisting of Metis AIPU and our adaptable Voyager SDK, makes the deployment of machine learning models an effortless task.
Sector-Specific Presence
Axelera has made its presence felt in a cross-section of domains ranging from industrial manufacturing, retail, security, healthcare, and robotics. In the endeavor of different countries developing smart cities, Axelera has revolutionized the use of AI in traffic management, public safety, and parking management. The highly cost-efficient, easy-to-integrate, and future-proof Axelera AI Metis Platform accelerates equipment and software deployment by providing a comprehensive hardware and software solution for accelerating Vision AI in security and safety applications.
Fabrizio Del Maffeo, CEO & Co-founder, has been vocal on how Axelera AI addresses market gaps with innovative computer vision AI accelerator hardware, delivering high performance and efficiency for the Embedded and Edge spaces at lower power consumption and cost.
Axelera, built using proprietary digital in-memory computing (D-IMC) technology and RISC-V dataflow architecture, delivers industry-leading performance and usability at a fraction of the cost and energy consumption of current solutions.
EU’s Research & Innovation
In August 2024, Axelera AI was co-funded by the European Union's Horizon research and innovation programme.
Axelera received a $66 million grant in March to develop an even more advanced chip dubbed “Titania” for use in supercomputing centres, also referred to as AI factories, across the European Union. That chip is expected in 2027.
What also came as a shot in the arm for this innovation-driven company was in April 2025, when Axelera AI was chosen as one of the first recipients of the EIC Step Up investment program. Besides, it is backed by other investors including Innovation Industries, Invest-NL, Samsung Catalyst Fund, Verve Ventures, Fractionelera, the Italian sovereign fund CDP Venture Capital SGR, RVO, Bitfury, Federal Holding, and the Investment Company of Belgium (SFPIM), and imec.
The vision and mission statement from Axelera clearly states that it is focused on building its solutions and the ecosystem that together will drive the democratization of AI, enabling a green, fair, and safe world.
It is a well stated fact, like similar to the Metis chip line, Axelera’s new Europa chips will be used for AI “inference”, running, not training, AI models. The Eindhoven, Netherlands-based company expects to sell the Europa line to customers in advanced industry settings, for instance in a factory that uses multiple cameras and sensors, where the chips would be used to analyse the combined data they produce and quickly identify problems.
Development of High-Performance Applications
Axelera provides a platform to consolidate workloads across facilities, deploy robotics and autonomous systems, and run complex models locally without datacenter infrastructure. Process in real-time and scale your operations from a single deployment.
The industry applications for Europa witness a wide array of sectors ranging from computer vision to space and industrial automation to high performance compute.
Presence of software in Axelera’s ambit include Voyager SDK, Model Zoo, and Benchmarks.
To ensure developers can get the most out of its performance-leading hardware, Axelera built the Voyager SDK, which facilitates the development of high-performance applications.
The Voyager SDK is purpose-built for Computer Vision at the Edge and enables customers to solve their AI business requirements by effortlessly deploying AI on edge devices.
The Metis AIPU is a high-performance accelerator for Edge AI, delivering up to 5x faster inference for Computer Vision tasks. More than just raw speed, Voyager optimizes the entire AI pipeline to ensure real-world application efficiency.
Partnerships and Collaborations
The action plan at Axelera with regard to its partner network is well thought out. Its engineering collaborations are a window to get access to training materials, in-person workshops, and co-create solutions. Besides offering joint marketing opportunities, Axelera opens up opportunities for dedicated training and prioritized access to technical experts. The partner system at Axelera include Dell, Advantech, Lenovo, Aetina, SECO, and Arduino.
“Today, our Metis product line is the leading inference accelerator for the edge. But that is just the beginning. Our roadmap, all centered on D-IMC, will scale across every use case, from edge to cloud with chiplets like Titania,” said a company statement.
As per Axelera, the first shipments of Europa chips, which are being manufactured by Samsung Electronics, will start in the first half of 2026.
Fabrizio Del Maffeo, Co-Founder & CEO, Axelera® AI
