Dutch AI Chipmaker Axelera AI Secures $250M With BlackRock Backing

The funding round was led by European venture capital firm Innovation Industries.

The round included new investors BlackRock and SiteGround Capital, alongside existing backers such as Bitfury, CDP Capital, the European Innovation Council Fund, and Samsung Catalyst Fund. The company has now raised more than $450 million in total.

Axelera AI develops chips and software for AI inference the process of running trained AI models an area growing rapidly as enterprises scale AI adoption. Its chips are built for edge devices, including smartphones, enabling more energy-efficient processing by handling data locally rather than in the cloud.

The company said the raise marks the largest funding round to date for an EU-based AI semiconductor firm and noted it serves 500 customers across sectors including defence, agritech, and robotics.

Describing its approach, it said: “Axelera AI’s success is rooted in a fundamental insight: to deploy AI at scale, the industry must first solve for energy consumption and cooling requirements.

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“The company’s edge-first architectural approach delivers uncompromising AI inference performance that fits within the power and thermal envelopes of real-world deployment environments to drive real business value."

Fabrizio Del Maffeo, CEO and co-founder of Axelera AI, said: “Data centres 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.

“We designed our architecture from the ground up to overcome these obstacles. Our edge-first approach isn’t just about efficiency; it’s about making AI deployment economically viable at scale for real-world applications while protecting data and privacy by processing customer information locally.”

Founded in 2021, Axelera AI delivers a powerful, AI-native hardware and software platform designed to accelerate edge computing.

The company builds energy-efficient chips and integrated software that enable fast cost-effective AI inference helping enterprises deploy scalable high-performance artificial intelligence applications across devices and industries worldwide with reduced power consumption.