Axelera AI, a Dutch startup building energy-efficient chips for AI, has raised a $250m round.
The raise brings total funding, including equity, debt and grants, to $450m to date, making Axelera one of the best-funded chip startups in Europe.
Led by Dutch deeptech VC Innovation Industries, the round also included participation from BlackRock and SiteGround Capital. Existing investors such as the European Investment Council Fund, Samsung Catalyst Fund and Invest-NL also returned to back the company in this round.
Axelera builds chips for inference, which occurs after training an AI model when the system applies its learnings to make a prediction on new data in the real world.
For most AI models, inference happens in the cloud, in large data centres that run the workload on graphics processing units (GPUs), the AI chips which are currently mainly produced by US tech titan Nvidia.
Axelera’s technology is designed to run inference more locally, on devices like laptops and cameras, which are known as “edge” devices. The company says it has developed a hardware and software architecture for chips that is more power efficient and is therefore adapted to the energy and bandwidth constraints of edge devices.
Fabrizio del Maffeo, Axelera’s CEO and cofounder, said businesses are increasingly moving AI workloads to the edge as data centres face performance limits.
“Our edge-first approach isn’t just about efficiency,” said del Maffeo in a statement. “It’s about making AI deployment economically viable at scale for real-world applications while protecting data and privacy by processing customer information locally.”
A growing market
As AI adoption increases, the global inference market is expected to more than double in size to $255bn in 2030 from $106bn in 2025, creating a strong need for cost-effective and energy-efficient chips.
Axelera is facing growing competition. Several companies in the US are working on building alternatives to Nvidia’s GPUs for inference including Etched AI, which is reportedly raising $500m at a $5bn valuation.
UK startup Fractile, which builds hardware and software for inference, also recently announced it will invest £100m in the next three years to expand its sites in London and Bristol and create a new engineering facility.
Axelera says it has shipped its technology to 500 customers globally in industries like defence, manufacturing, retail, agritech, robotics and security.
The Dutch startup plans to expand the scale of its manufacturing capabilities and to double down on commercialisation.
