Edge AI hardware startup Axelera AI has raised more than $250 million in a funding round.

The round was led by Innovation Industries and saw participation from BlackRock and SiteGround Capital, alongside existing investors Bitfury, CDP Venture Capital, European Investment Council Fund, Federal Holding and Investment Company of Belgium (SFPIM), Invest-NL, Samsung Catalyst Fund, and Verve Investments.

It brings the total raised by the company since 2021 to $450m. The new capital will be used to scale up the company’s manufacturing efforts, expand its customer success and partner networks, and further advance its software tools and software development kit (SDK).

In a statement announcing the fundraise, Axelera AI claimed the round represents the “largest investment ever” in a European AI semiconductor company, and comes as it ships to its 500th global customer across industries that include defense, industrial manufacturing, robotics, and security.

“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,” said Fabrizio Del Maffeo, CEO and co-founder of Axelera AI.

“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 and headquartered in Eindhoven, the Netherlands – the same town where photolithography equipment maker ASML is based, Axelera AI announced in March 2025 that it had received a €61.6m ($71.5m) grant from the EuroHPC Joint Undertaking’s Digital Autonomy with RISC-V for Europe (DARE) Project to support its development of its Titania AI inference chiplet.

In October 2025, the company unveiled its Europa chip. Designed to support high-performance Edge computing use cases, including generative AI and computer vision applications, the AI processor unit (AIPU) delivers up to 629 TOPS at INT8 precision, setting a new industry benchmark for performance, the company claimed.