Axelera AI, a Dutch developer of artificial intelligence chips for edge devices, has announced a significant funding round exceeding $250 million. The investment was led by Amsterdam-based Innovation Industries, with participation from major players like BlackRock and Samsung Catalyst Fund.
The company's flagship product, the Metis AI chip, boasts capabilities of 214 trillion computations per second with a low power consumption of approximately 10 watts, making it ideal for battery-powered connected devices, such as warehouse robots requiring embedded AI navigation.
Metis utilizes Axelera AI's proprietary digital in-memory computing (D-IMC) architecture. This innovative approach minimizes power usage by performing data storage and processing within the same circuits, eliminating the need for constant data shuffling between separate components, a common bottleneck in traditional AI processors.
D-IMC's crossbar array configuration efficiently handles vector and matrix calculations, fundamental to AI models. "Data centers are hitting power and cooling limits, and as analytics move closer to where data is being created, edge AI solutions must operate within strict energy and bandwidth constraints," stated Axelera AI CEO Fabrizio Del Maffeo. "We designed our architecture from the ground up to overcome these obstacles."
Axelera AI offers Metis through accelerator cards, including a PCIe version with up to four chips and a compact M.2 interface for low-power devices. Customers can leverage the Voyager SDK, which integrates with Apache TVM, and access pre-packaged models from the Model Zoo.
Currently in development is the second-generation Europa chip, designed for enhanced performance with 629 trillion computations per second and featuring 8 AI-optimized cores. Axelera AI claims Europa offers up to three times the performance per watt of competitors, particularly suited for computer vision tasks, processing over 13,168 frames per second in internal tests.
The substantial new funding will be directed towards scaling chip manufacturing, expanding the customer success team, and growing the company's partner network.