Leuven-based Axelera AI brings first products to a potential 30 billion dollar market

Axelera AI is a start-up that raised $50 million in capital in two years from investors including the Leuven investment fund imec.xpand and the federal government (FPIM). The company designs chips and software to bring AI out of the "cloud" and to the "edge. Current AI systems generate large streams of data that are sent and processed in centralized, energy-hungry data centers. With Edge AI, the technology Axelera is developing, that data processing takes place on the chip and in the machine, which is much faster and cheaper.

Axelera's first product, Metis AI, is a chip platform for applications in computer vision, such as sorting machines or cameras that can recognize products or patterns. Axelera AI says it enables AI applications that are much more efficient than traditional chip-based systems from U.S. market leader Nvidia, which are typically used in data centers.

The Leuven department is one of the company's three research groups, which develops both hardware (processing unit and memory) and algorithms. Verhoef and several other employees have backgrounds at the Leuven chip research institute Imec. Axelera also has departments in Zurich, Milan, Florence and Bristol. 'We are in the places where knowledge and people can be found,' says Verhoef. 'Of our 130 employees, some 50 are PhDs, and that number continues to grow.'

Like many chip companies, Axelera operates only as a designer rather than a manufacturer. That job is outsourced to Taiwanese giant TSMC. Should that supply chain be interrupted, say by an attack by China, we can also turn to Intel, the company says. "But we don't expect anything like that to happen in the next few years.