Axelera AI, a chip designer based in Eindhoven in the Netherlands, raised more than $250m in a new funding round, it announced on 24 February 2026.
Innovation Industries led the round. BlackRock and SiteGround Capital joined as new investors, and existing backers Bitfury, CDP Venture Capital, the European Innovation Council Fund, the Belgian federal holding company SFPIM, Invest-NL, Samsung Catalyst Fund and Verve Investments also took part. The company did not disclose a valuation.
Axelera called the deal the largest investment ever in an EU AI semiconductor company. Reuters described it as one of the largest investments to date in a European AI chipmaker.
“As a Dutch investor, we're proud to support homegrown innovation that's competing on the global stage in AI acceleration.”Johan Stins, Invest-NL
What Axelera AI does
Axelera designs hardware that runs AI models, a task known as inference, mainly at the edge: on devices and in local systems rather than in large data centres. The company says its architecture is built to deliver inference performance within the power and cooling limits of real-world deployments, and that processing data locally helps protect privacy and meet demand for sovereign technology.
The company says it has shipped to more than 500 customers in industries including telecommunications, aerospace, defence and public safety, industrial manufacturing, retail, agritech, 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," chief executive and co-founder Fabrizio Del Maffeo said in the announcement.
"We designed our architecture from the ground up to overcome these obstacles," he added. The company argues that to deploy AI at scale, the industry must first deal with the energy use and cooling requirements of running models.
What the money is for
Axelera said the funding would go towards scaling manufacturing, expanding its partner network and developing its software development kit further.
Del Maffeo told Reuters the money would be used to expand manufacturing of the company's Europa chip, which is due to launch before June, and to build software that makes its chips easier for customers to use. Europa is an inference chip intended to run AI models in industrial settings.
Axelera is also working on a chip called Titania for supercomputing centres under a European Union project. It received a $66m grant for that work in March 2025, and the chip is expected in 2027, Reuters reported.
The funding so far
Including this round, Axelera has attracted more than $450m in equity, grants and venture debt since it was incorporated in July 2021, the company said. It did not break down its earlier rounds.
Johan Stins of Invest-NL said the Dutch investor was backing homegrown innovation that competes globally in AI acceleration. He said the Netherlands had long been strong in semiconductor technology, and pointed to the company's customer traction in Europe and beyond and to the experience of its leadership team in scaling deep-tech companies.
Company website: axelera.ai