(Editor’s note: This special edition of the Eindhoven Business Briefing is dedicated to Axelera AI. Dispatches covers tech because our highly skilled experts are always searching for new career or investment opportunities. You can see a list of open positions here. The EBB is part of Dispatches’ Tech Tuesday series.)
Finally. After watching the parade of AI Unicorns coming out of Silicon Valley, Eindhoven has its own. And its founder is an expat, thank you very much.
Amsterdam-based VC Innovation Industries is leading a $250 million investment round in Axelera AI, based on High Tech Campus Eindhoven, the biggest investment in an AI semiconductor company in Europe. Included in the syndication are Wall Street private equity giant BlackRock and Seoul-based Samsung Capital, which was already an investor.
This brings the total invested in the AI chipmaker to $450 million since it was founded just less than five years ago. No valuation was revealed for this latest round. Valuation typically is based on the percentage of the company acquired, and $250 million would indicate a valuation between $1 billion and $2 billion.
This is personal for us. Dispatches operates out of the AI Innovation Center on High Tech Campus where Axelera is based, so we see founder and CEO Fabrizio Del Matteo on a regular basis and have interviewed him many times. Are we fanboys and fangirls? Oh, hell yeah.
Axelera AI makes chips for inference, the process of running AI models in real-world applications. But Fabrizio started out working on AI at the edge … that is, processing data and whatever in closed systems including personal computers and embedded systems, not in the cloud. Edge applications increase security and reduce reliance on data centers powered by GPUs in servers. The big question is, as AI use increases, where are we going to find the energy for all the server farms? Axelera is part of the answer, since inference – the process of using machine learning to solve problems or create content or art – can run on a decentralized chip architecture.
We remember meeting Fabrizio, a native of Italy, about four years ago when Axelera received a Gerard and Anton Award. When we interviewed him 10 months ago (see the video above), he told us he’d just signed Axelera’s 100th customer. “The golden age of Axelera is going to come, and it’s going to come soon,” he said. He wasn’t kidding.
The Axelera media release announcing the latest investment round states that Axelera has 500 global customer across physical AI and edge AI in industries including defense and public safety, industrial manufacturing, retail, agritech, robotics and security. So, that client base has quintupled in 12 months.
Take that, Palo Alto.
Over the years, we’ve listened in stunned silence as Fabrizio made his growth projections – 220 employees 10 months ago, people and plans to announce a second product line later in 2025, with a third one by early-to mid-2026. That means expanding the team. Del Maffeo projected Axelera would reach 270 employees by end of 2025.
In addition to its Eindhoven HQ, Axelera has offices in Belgium, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and Italy and operations in 15 European countries.
You can see more about Axelera here in Dispatches’ archives.
InSpace takes big space on HTCE
Speaking of High Tech Campus Eindhoven, InSpace just leased the top floor of the newest and tallest building on campus, HTC 91, aka Lucis One. InSpace is relocating from the Flight Forum office complex at Eindhoven Airport. InSpace has created tech that helps digital companies transition from search engine optimization to AI optimization.
Co-CEO of Dispatches Europe. A former military reporter, I'm a serial expat who has lived in France, Turkey, Germany and the Netherlands.
